How Senior Engineers Lose Trust

Why familiar habits start reading as risk at senior levels.

Imagine you have a cousin named 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.