Yesterday, I wrote about how senior developers talk & why learning to communicate like a senior developer is critical to your career.
A followup from yesterday's post is that senior developers talk about high-level problems before they get into implementation details.
When senior developers talk, it’s usually agnostic of the tech stack or programming language. Sure, we can get into the implementation details later. But, the problem is primarily a “software engineering problem,” not a “React component problem” or a “Django REST API problem.”
Senior developers have been around a while and seen the same problems in multiple languages & frameworks. They know that this problem isn’t unique to the current tech stack. It’s more general than that, and the solution can be as well.
While senior developers don’t all share the same background, they do share the ability to recognize certain patterns they’ve seen before.
When you’re brainstorming a solution to a problem, getting mired in implementation details is a liability. Senior developers want to think about the problem at a higher, abstract level of what should be possible.
If you introduce implementation questions — about the specific tech stack — when we’re still planning the overall approach, then we could miss the forest for the trees!
Senior engineers want to make sure they’re solving the right problems and taking the best approach. The implementation details can come later.
The most important lesson is to start thinking and talking in terms of high-level problems, not low-level implementation. Senior engineers know that once we’ve agreed and communicated the approach, then the implementation details are trusted to the engineer who actually works the ticket.