Anal Jyoti Goswami

Posted on May 20

The Dirty Secret of Senior Engineers: They Just Got Better at Hiding It

#programming #career #computerscience #developer

When I was a junior developer, I had a theory about senior engineers.

I thought they were a different species.

Not smarter exactly — just wired differently. Like their brain had some extra module installed that mine was still waiting on. They walked into meetings and casually said things like:

“We should probably use a lazy-loaded module federation setup with a shared Angular state layer.”

…with the same energy I use to say:

“I’ll grab coffee.”

No hesitation. No visible effort. Just answers appearing fully formed.

I spent years waiting for my brain to install that module.

It never did.

What I eventually realized was much more uncomfortable:

The module doesn’t exist.

What I was watching wasn’t certainty. It was a performance of certainty — polished over years until it became indistinguishable from the real thing. And like most junior engineers, I was sitting in the audience learning completely wrong lessons about what competence was supposed to feel like internally.

I Didn’t Start as a Developer

My first role wasn’t software engineering.

It was end-to-end business process testing for SAP systems. Procure-to-pay. Order-to-cash. Walking through workflows and figuring out where systems broke, where configurations failed, or where reality diverged from what people thought the software was doing.

It was not glamorous work.

But looking back, it quietly shaped the way I think about systems more than almost anything else in my career.

Because you cannot test what you do not understand.

You have to understand:

the process flow
the data
the edge cases
the integrations
the user behavior
the failure modes

…all at the same time.

Otherwise you miss things.

I never formally became “techno-functional,” but that experience gave me something incredibly valuable early on:

A testing mindset.

The habit of thinking about downstream effects, weird user behavior, integration gaps, and all the places reality quietly diverges from architecture diagrams, requirement documents, and happy-path user flows.

I think that’s part of why I feel technically confident today.

Not because I always know the answer.

But because I learned early that systems only really make sense once you understand how they fail.

At the time though?

Watching senior developers and architects in meetings, I just felt behind.

What Senior Engineering Actually Feels Like

Ten years later, I’m the one in the architecture meetings.

Lead engineer. Fullstack. AI systems. Cloud infrastructure. Distributed systems. DevOps. Product architecture.

And I can tell you honestly:

The performance is still happening.

I just understand it better now.

Picture a typical Tuesday.

We’re designing a platform architecture that will affect deployment decisions, release pipelines, scaling behavior, and operational workflows across multiple teams.

Someone draws boxes and arrows on a whiteboard.

Someone says “event streaming.”

I nod slowly — partly because I’m thinking, partly because I’m buying time.

Inside my head:

Okay, the backend itself is fine. But the event routing for this service mesh is going to become a nightmare:

dead-letter queues,
retry handling,
multiple queues feeding the same service,
eventual consistency issues…

and I haven’t actually implemented this exact combination before.

I really hope nobody asks me about the x-requirement implementation right now.

This is not a crisis.

This is Tuesday.

The Hidden Part of Code Reviews

Then comes the code review.

I open a pull request from a junior developer and see this:

List<UserDTO> result = users.stream()
    .filter(u -> u.getStatus().equals("ACTIVE"))
    .map(u -> new UserDTO(u.getId(), u.getName()))
    .collect(Collectors.toList());

I leave a clean, confident review comment:

“Maybe use Collectors.toUnmodifiableList() here to avoid accidental downstream mutation.”

Professional. Concise. Senior-engineer-like.

What the comment does not show is the actual process that produced it:

// What actually happened:

1. Read the code twice
2. Mentally simulated execution flow
3. Opened documentation again
4. Remembered a production issue from years ago
5. Asked AI whether I was overthinking mutability
6. Still not entirely certain this belongs in the service layer
7. Left comment anyway because it feels directionally correct

The feedback improves the code.

But the process stays invisible.

And that invisibility does damage.

Because someone with two years of experience is reading that review and thinking:

“Senior engineers already know the answers.”

They do not see:

the uncertainty
the memory recall
the docs tabs
the debugging history
the pattern matching
the verification process

They only see confidence.

That creates a very different story.

The Lie Junior Engineers Accidentally Learn

I know this because I was that person.

Fresh out of testing, moving into fullstack development, watching senior engineers move effortlessly between Angular frontends, backend classes, HANA procedures, internal tables, BSP deployments, and debugging sessions like the entire stack was just sitting neatly inside their heads.

Every confident review comment.

Every architecture decision.

Every:

“We should split this into a separate service.”

…felt like evidence that I was behind.

The cross-functional meetings were the worst.

You’re sitting in rooms where half the people speak business and half speak technology, and somehow the senior engineer appears fluent in both.

What you don’t see:

the preparation beforehand
the requirement documents they read the night before
the conversations with product owners
the internal confusion they resolved privately before the meeting started

You only see the final polished version.

There’s actually a name for this phenomenon:

Pluralistic ignorance.

Everyone privately feels uncertain while publicly assuming everyone else is fine.

Engineering culture accidentally amplifies this.

Junior engineers stay quiet because senior engineers seem certain.

Senior engineers stay quiet because they learned that uncertainty should be hidden.

And eventually the silence itself gets mistaken for competence.

The Part Nobody Talks About

The cruelest part is how this gets passed down.

It’s 2021.

A mid-level engineer is staring at a brutal production issue.

A service keeps failing under load for reasons that don’t fully make sense. Memory usage looks normal until suddenly it isn’t. Requests timeout inconsistently. Thread pools behave strangely. Logs are noisy but somehow useless.

This is still pre-AI.

Stack Overflow is basically a religious institution at this point.

So it becomes:

two days of reading logs
reproducing failures in sandbox environments
digging through obscure Stack Overflow posts from 2014
testing theories nobody else can see
slowly narrowing uncertainty until something finally clicks

Then the issue gets fixed.

The sprint moves on.

Nobody talks about the confusion beforehand.

Nobody talks about the dead ends.

Nobody talks about the panic.

That part quietly disappears from the story.

What survives instead is the mythology:

Senior engineers see answers faster
Senior engineers feel less lost
Senior engineers are naturally confident

Five years later, that same engineer becomes the lead.

A junior developer looks at them during another production issue, waiting for some signal that confusion is normal.

But by then the performance has become automatic.

Not because anyone is malicious.

Because nobody ever modeled uncertainty honestly for them either.

What Actually Helps

The funny thing is that fixing this culture does not require massive organizational change.

It requires tiny moments of honesty.

A lead engineer saying:

“I’m not fully convinced this integration approach will scale the way we think it will. Let’s validate it first.”

An architect casually admitting:

“I had to re-read the event routing docs this morning because I forgot how this edge case behaves.”

A code review comment saying:

// Works correctly.
// I'm not entirely convinced this belongs in the service layer though.
// Would like a second opinion.

Tiny things.

But those tiny things change entire team cultures.

Because the biggest thing junior engineers almost never get to see is this:

Senior engineers are not people who stopped feeling lost.

They are people who got better at functioning while lost.

Better at narrowing uncertainty.

Better at pattern recognition.

Better at asking targeted questions.

Better at surviving the moments where they have absolutely no idea what they’re doing.

The confidence was never the skill.

The skill was learning not to panic inside uncertainty.

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