I think the article is reasonable but it suffers from the imprecision of "senior" as many things do. What is a 'senior' engineer in a startup, or at a mid-size

I think the article is reasonable but it suffers from the imprecision of "senior" as many things do. What is a 'senior' engineer in a startup, or at a mid-size private company, or a large public company? All of those companies have "senior engineers" but they aren't easily swapped out for each other. These are my definitions, at a startup a senior engineer is one that is broad enough in their experience to have gone deeply into one area and at least lightly into several others. They understand what technical debt it and when to use it, and when to avoid it. What is more, they can communicate what needs to be done to a more junior engineer. In a mid-size private company a senior engineer knows all of the forces that are being applied to their area of expertise, they know what the cost constraints are on the solution, they know what the time constraints are. They understand the area fully and can review other's work and participate productively in design reviews and product planning sessions. They can be an axis of excellence by leading by example and surfacing things that need to be fixed early. At a large publicly traded company a senior engineer is one who can relate the business to the engineering effort to insure that they are doing the engineering that is needed and more importantly they are not doing engineering that is not needed. To paraphrase, "With great resources comes great re-invention." Large well funded engineering teams tend to re-invent the wheel because they can, not because they need to. And as a result can become mired in self inflicted complexity. It is the role of the senior engineers to see to it that it doesn't happen. Very different jobs.