01 · Section
AI raised the floor, not the ceiling
Junior engineers shipping with AI copilots are dramatically more productive than they were two years ago — but the ceiling on what a senior engineer can do has risen even faster. The senior bar is now: architectural judgement, strong product instincts, and the taste to know when AI output is wrong.
Hiring funnels that screen on "can write a binary search by hand" are filtering out exactly the people you want to hire.
02 · Section
What actually screens for seniority
A 60-minute design conversation about a real problem from the candidate's past. Listen for tradeoffs, scope decisions, and what they would do differently. Generic system-design questions reward memorisation; real-history questions reward judgement.
A pair-programming session on the candidate's laptop, on a small bug in their language of choice. You learn more from watching someone debug than from any take-home test.
03 · Section
Why senior engineers actually leave
They leave when the work stops being interesting, when leadership stops listening, and when the codebase becomes unmaintainable faster than they can fix it. Salary matters; it is almost never the top reason.
Retention is a product problem. Senior engineers want autonomy, agency over the codebase, and visible leadership investment in code quality. Those three things outpredict comp by a wide margin.
Key takeaways
- Senior engineering is judgement and taste, not algorithm trivia.
- Screen with real-history design conversations and live-debugging sessions.
- Pay competitively, then compete on autonomy, agency and code-quality investment.
- Drop interview steps that reward memorisation over reasoning.
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Written by
Aamir Khan
6 min read · Posted in Web Development