The Real #1 Sign You've Become a Senior Software Engineer

14 Jun 2025 #career

I’m not exactly sure when “Senior” made its way into my title.

In my last full-time job, I was “Software Engineer 1” out of 5. But I worked on the main features of the software, was in the on-call rotation, and sat in meetings with the company’s president. A “SWE 1” wasn’t supposed to be doing most of those tasks.

OK, that was at a small shop in my city, so maybe it wasn’t that impressive. And it took me about 5 years and a lot of hard work to get there.

Although “Senior” wasn’t officially part of my title, there was a sign I saw in my coworkers and mentors, and later connecting the dots, I noticed I had absorbed from them:

Knowing when to stop because a solution is good enough.

As non-seniors, we keep wasting time:

• Adding abstractions,
• Micro-optimizing infrequently-used code,
• Debating variable names during code reviews,
• Starting massive unrequested refactorings, and
• Overengineering our app to make it scale.

You’re senior when you truly master YAGNI, not only in your code files, but across your entire career.

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