Senior also means that I built up a certain way of reasoning and avoiding or working around common problems I see this in my current senior colleagues, who may

Senior also means that I built up a certain way of reasoning and avoiding or working around common problems I see this in my current senior colleagues, who may be very OOP-oriented but they are incredibly productive because they are super experienced in their field and in the code-base. I 100% respect that type of seniority of course, because I have learned a lot from my seniors. Regarding my productivity I think it is first and foremost related to how my brain solves problems. I especially like the idea of Data-Oriented Design, because I think of solving programming problems as three simple steps: 1. Some data comes in 2. Data needs to be transformed into something else (based on some business rules) 3. Data needs to be presented So when I want to solve a problem I first define my data, then I define my transformation functions and then where they are used afterwards. It's not necessarily a purely functional approach, since they do change state as opposed to returning new state, but it has very little overhead in my brain. And as you mention concurrency, it simplifies it vastly because you usually know exactly who is using which data where. I work mostly on engine development, so there's a lot of room for optimization and understanding how a lot of data is transformed every frame, which makes performance a super interesting topic for me. I can reason much more easily about performance in a procedural code-base than in an OOP code-base, so that might be part of my bias. :)