Yeah this has also been my experience more or less. Senior engineers do get some tasks (scope the work, design the implementation, etc) but generally "building

Yeah this has also been my experience more or less. Senior engineers do get some tasks (scope the work, design the implementation, etc) but generally "building systems" is in the purview of the principals and architects. I've had some companies that let seniors do more as they get closer to their next rank but generally these opportunities are fairly isolated and triple checked by the actual shot callers. At senior you're still a code monkey. Just typically very experienced and capable of managing a small team of juniors. > To them, creating software is just one of the steps. First of all, they question whether the software needs to be built in the first place. They ask what problems would it solve and why it’s important to solve them. They inquire who will be using the software and on what scale. They think about where the software would run and how they’re going to monitor whether it’s working properly. They also decide how to measure whether the software is actually solving the problems it was supposed to solve. Based on this definition I would suggest the author is using "senior" as a modifier to include all positions above junior rather than the typical titling. Moreover, the amount of times I've been given any time at all to actually think about the system things will run on, or how we will determine if it's performant, I can count on one hand. If this is the author's experience he is very lucky to have a company that cares about end-to-end performance.