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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

A very important skill for Senior engineers not mentioned in the article is an ability to take the initiative on something. For example, when a dev sees a bug in an area of code they aren't responsible for and thinks "I'll raise an issue for that and mention it to the product manager so we can get it fixed" instead of "Oh, a bug", then they're starting to show that senior mindset. It's a desire to make the whole of the software good rather than just the little bit they work on good.

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I have literally never seen or thought of this as “senior” thing. if anyone on the team regardless of their seniority does not operate this way they will see a quick exit to some other place

beware, some cultures are territorial in nature and this kind of hard ownership will make people slap you if you ever try to improve things as they come.

i'm in the camp of improving things regularly without hesitation but again this can devolve. another way it can turn sour is when the team is made of people too different from each other. one improvement from someone pov is a waste or even a regression for others .. then it's a 'who decides here' conversation.

that said when you have a cohesive group all focusing on pushing in the same direction then it's bliss

If you're skilled enough, sometimes you can even force the culture to change. It can be painful and not all battles are worth it, but it's doable.

probably, that said i would love to hear stories on this

ps: even beyond work, that kind of knowledge is very important, culture is a form of abstract layer over a group, and it can make or break your future

I did this by constantly complaining about JavaScript and how TypeScript is so much better until some of my colleagues started writing new projects in TypeScript.

Then that's a bug in the organization. If you're senior enough you might make the correct boss take notice and signal this defect globally (no fingerpointing) to him/her. If they don't care or answer you know where you are now and know if you consider that you want to leave or not.

I am literally not allowed to fix bugs at work. Nothing senior about going rogue and showing initiative.

In that case I would ticket the specific bug with as much detail as possible for scheduling. Is that also not possible? That would sound like hell…

Its a startup that prioritizes features, once we have a few more customers we can scrap the project and focus on quality over quantity and actually check what the customers actually use. Fixing stuff at this point in time is looked at as a waste of time. Mind we do ticketing and cashless and already serve small festivals, so in my mind it would be important to fix things but I am not the person deciding on this.

This has nothing to do with seniority. This is a question of priorities.

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