How Senior Engineers Lose Trust
Why good junior habits start reading as a 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.
