Why 'senior' stopped being a useful word on my team

For most of my career, "senior engineer" meant something fuzzy: more experience, presumably better judgment, probably a higher salary band. It was a title that accumulated meaning through vibes rather than definition. That worked fine when teams were small enough that everyone's actual capabilities were common knowledge. It stopped working somewhere around 60 engineers, when I realized two people with the same title had almost nothing in common in terms of what I could actually rely on them for.

So we rebuilt our leveling around specific, observable behaviors instead of years of experience or vague seniority. Not "senior can handle ambiguity" -- what does that actually mean when someone is stuck? We ended up with things like: a senior engineer, given an ambiguous problem with no clear owner, will either resolve the ambiguity themselves within a reasonable timeframe or escalate with a clear, specific ask -- not sit blocked, and not silently make a unilateral call on something that affects other teams without communicating it.

That's a mouthful compared to "handles ambiguity well," but it's testable. You can look at what someone actually did in a real ambiguous situation and check it against the behavior, rather than asking a manager to vibe-check "seniority" in a calibration meeting.

The uncomfortable part of this exercise was discovering how much our existing levels didn't match reality. We had staff engineers who were excellent at deep technical work but who, when faced with genuine ambiguity, would either go silent for two weeks or make a unilateral call that blindsided another team. By the behavioral definition, that's not staff-level judgment, regardless of the code quality. We had to have some hard conversations.

The payoff, a year later: promotion conversations got dramatically less political, because we were arguing about specific documented incidents instead of impressions. New hires got a much clearer picture of what was actually expected of them at each level. And "senior" stopped being a word that meant six different things depending on who was using it.