You Were Hired as the Senior Engineer and the Juniors Know the Code Better

You joined three weeks ago with senior in your title and fifteen years of experience behind you. In stand up, a developer eighteen months out of university explains exactly why the payment retry fails on weekends, and you have not yet worked out where the payment code lives. Everyone seems to be waiting for you to add something wise. You nod and feel like a fraud.

That feeling is understandable, and it is based on a misunderstanding of why you were hired. Nobody brought you in because you knew this codebase. They could not have, because nobody outside the company knows it. You were hired for judgement, for having seen many systems fail in many ways, for knowing which problems are worth solving and which can wait. Those things do not show up in your first month. They show up over the first year.

Local knowledge is learned quickly. Judgement takes years. The juniors on your team have the first, and you have the second, which means you need each other.

So let them teach you, openly. Ask the person who explained the retry bug to walk you through the payment flow. Ask what confuses them about the code, because the answers will tell you where the real problems are. Being taught by someone more junior, without embarrassment, shows the whole team what learning looks like. It is one of the most senior things you can do.

Meanwhile, contribute what you do know. You may not know why the weekend retry fails, but you can ask whether anyone has thought about what happens if it fails twice. You can notice that three people are solving the same problem in different ways. You can ask who gets paged when this breaks. Good questions from experience are valuable long before you know where everything lives.

Be careful not to compensate by talking too much, or by suggesting a rewrite of something you do not yet understand. That is how new senior engineers lose trust in their first month.

Give it a season. The day will come when a junior asks you why something is the way it is, and you will know. You will both have learned something by then.

– Asael Shinder