Imagine you have a cousin: Max. He’s eight. Big eyes behind bigger glasses. Wants to help with everything. Groceries, bikes, your website. He learned “HTML” yesterday and now he’s got strong opinions about CSS. It’s exhausting. But it’s sweet. You call him brilliant. Ruffle his hair. He beams like you just handed him a Nobel.
Now picture Max at thirty-seven. Same energy. Same need to help. Same unsolicited advice about your website, only now it comes with two decades of crusty tech takes and no sense of timing. You don’t ruffle his hair anymore. You brace. And that, right there, is the whole problem.
It plays out every day on engineering teams. There are behaviors we celebrate in junior devs. We cheer. We promote. We blog about it. Then, often without warning, we turn around and penalize those exact behaviors in the same people once they get promoted. No one tells them the rules changed. But they did.
Here are five flips, and how to carry them like a senior.
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### 1. “I’ll Just Fix It”
**As a junior:** it’s initiative. It’s hunger. You dive into a haunted repo, slay an obscure bug, open a PR. Everyone claps.
**As a senior:** it’s reckless. “You didn’t loop in ops.” “That’s not our domain.” “Did you follow the change management process?”
Same behavior. Different expectations.
Seniority shifts the burden. It’s not about the fix anymore. It’s about the impact. The communication. The blast radius. You can’t play cowboy anymore. You’re expected to build fences.
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### 2. Working Nights and Weekends
Juniors who grind are framed as passionate. “So driven.” And maybe they are. Maybe they’re just trying to prove themselves. And maybe that’s fine. Because no one expects them to model sustainability.
But when seniors do it? “Why are you working off-hours?” “Are you hiding something?” ”You are setting a bad example.”
Now you’re not modeling passion. You’re signaling instability. You’re not showing commitment. You’re showing fear. Balance isn’t optional. It’s your job now.
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### 3. Asking a Lot of Questions
For juniors: questions mean curiosity. We carve out time. We mentor. We celebrate.
For seniors: questions raise eyebrows. Didn’t you read the doc? Weren’t you in that meeting? Aren’t you supposed to already know?
You can still ask. But now the bar is higher. Your questions are expected to be surgical, not scattered. Too many. Too basic. People stop seeing curiosity. They start seeing gaps.
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### 4. Being “Extra” Helpful
Juniors who jump into every thread, every PR, every side project. They get stickers, shoutouts, extra tacos on demo day.
Seniors who do the same? “Can’t prioritize.” “Always scattered.” “Needs to operate more like a lead.”
Same generosity. Different signal. Saying yes isn’t the job anymore. Knowing when to say no is.
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### 5. Loud Enthusiasm
Juniors love loudly. And we love that they love. New framework? New tool? “This changes everything!” and it feels true.
But when seniors gush, people get cautious. What’s the catch? What’s the angle? What nuance are you missing?
You’re expected to have seen more. Broken more. Considered more.
You can still love things. Just love them with context. With history. With tradeoffs.
Be excited. Be measured.
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### Nobody Warns You When the Rules Change
There’s no meeting. No Slack ping. No “Hey, heads up, your gold stars just became red flags.” You just start getting weird feedback. You get passed over. You hear someone less experienced praised for doing the thing you were just told to stop doing.
It’s not fair. But it’s not personal. It’s structural. It’s about interpretation. About how your behavior reads in context. About scale. About signal.
As a junior, your job is to execute, to help, to try.
As a senior, your job is to steady the ship. To think in systems. To know that what you do says something, even if you don’t say it out loud.
You don’t stop being curious. Or helpful. Or excited. You just learn to use those tools like a scalpel. Because people are watching. And whether they say it or not, they’ve already decided what a senior is supposed to look like.
Make sure they see you when they look up.
Because I am rooting for you.
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https://tahahussain.substack.com/p/how-senior-engineers-lose-trust
