This feels like the difference between someone who _needs_ mentoring and someone who does not. In other words, a senior engineer according to your definition ca

This feels like the difference between someone who _needs_ mentoring and someone who does not. In other words, a senior engineer according to your definition can (mostly) "manage themselves". I do think that this is good in that it gets at the core of what makes a software engineer good (from the perspective of a good manager). At the same time, this is sort of an oversimplification the levels to senior engineers. I've seen a lot of people who have skills that really make them signficantly more effective than other people on the team (particularly me). Here are just some of the common differentiators: - Getting tasks done [1]: As antirez says, I've noticed that some people just implement things quickly, while others take too much time. Even worse, many experienced engineers learn "too much" and make their code too "perfect" out of habit, even if they are aware of their perfectionism. - Architecture ability: Some people simply come up with good designs more quickly. They know which data stores to use. Their predictions about scale turn out to be correct. Their designs are simple enough for other engineers to understand. Overall, their designs simply turn out to take a lot less time for the team to implement, test, and release to the customer (and not necessarily in that order). - Expertise in CS fields: Hard problems do come up and block engineers. Good people can avoid/work around the unsolved ones and just implement that fancy downsampling or concurrency control technique when performance/correctness matters. (Ex: your shiny microservice mess is full of thorny networks/dist computing/database problems. I've seen multiple inter-service race conditions from people who don't know what a transaction is) - Tooling experience: The person with experience with k8s will implement more quickly than the person who's never worked with a cluster manager. This is not that important, but more important than many more experienced engineers say it is. How long can you wait until your team is supposed to have a working system? - Other qualities: product expertise, user design, interpersonal (some people singlehandedly make a team's culture good), ops skills, analytics skills, hiring (well now this is just more about what makes a general employee valuable) [1] http://antirez.com/news/112 http://antirez.com/news/112