alt Hacker NewsAnd this is usually one of the defining traits of a senior engineer. They understand the tech and its limitations, and thus are able to look around corners, ask good questions, and, overall, provide quality product input.
And this is usually one of the defining traits of a senior engineer. They understand the tech and its limitations, and thus are able to look around corners, ask good questions, and, overall, provide quality product input.
In other words, prudential judgement.
Programs are a socially constructed artifact that help communicate and express a model (which is perpetually locked in people's heads with variance across engineers; divergence is addressed as the program develops). Determining what should or should not be done is a matter of not just domain knowledge, but practical reason, which is to say prudence, which is a virtue that can only be acquired by experience. It is an ability to apply universal principles to particular situations.
This is why young devs, even when clever in some local sense, are worse at understanding the right moves to make in context. Code does not stand alone. It exists entirely in the service of something and is bound by constraints that are external to it.