From Junior to Senior: The Mindset Beyond the Stack | Eric Ashenden

Not long ago a teammate asked me for advice. They were stuck and wanted to know which technologies to learn to “level up.” Here’s the thing, the jump from junior to senior isn’t about a specific tool. It’s about how you think, how you work, and how you treat people.

1) Make other engineers' lives easier

Early in my career, a senior dev told me: “Try to never make another engineer's life harder.” That doesn't mean “never ask for help.” It means do your homework first.

Spend focused time exploring the problem.
Write down what you tried, what happened, and what you think is going on.
When you ask for help, include that context and a concrete question.

Showing up with zero attempts signals “please do my job.” Showing up with a clear trail of work invites collaboration.

Lightweight habit: keep a scratch file or notes page open while you debug. Even if it’s just half-baked notes in a sticky file you’ve left open on your desktop since the dawn of time, it’s better than nothing.

2) Be fearless, not reckless

At one job, the company prided itself on being “blameless.” We'd break things, fix them, learn, and move on. It taught me a lot about being fearless.

Fearless in dev? Fantastic! Experiment, break things, learn fast.
Fearless in prod? That’s reckless. Think through blast radius, rollback, and observability before touching anything.

Accountability still matters. If you cause a problem, own it. But also know, failure’s part of the gig. You can't innovate without breaking something first.

Dev is where you experiment. Prod is where you prove you've learned.

3) Be humble, hungry, and socially intelligent

Patrick Lencioni's “The Ideal Team Player” gives a solid compass. It's simple advice that holds up well. My translation:

Humble: You want to be humble, but not timid or arrogant. You don’t want to be timid because as engineers we need to be willing to speak up. You don’t want to be arrogant because no one likes an asshole. Humble yet confident will make people listen when you do talk.
Hungry: I like to think about this as where do you get your work? Do you only complete assigned tasks, or do you proactively look for ways to improve things? Do you read team discussions, listen to developer pain points, and think about solutions?
Socially intelligent: Technical skills can be learned, but social intelligence is harder to teach. Are you aware of what helps vs what annoys others? Do you communicate clearly, collaborate effectively, and know how to navigate conflicts?

Technical depth is teachable. Social drag is expensive.

4) DRY isn't just for code

I try really hard not to ask the same question twice. Doesn't always work, I'm human, but I do everything I can to avoid it.

I search Teams. I skim recordings. I even check my notes graveyard full of half finished OneNote pages. If I still can't find the answer, I'll Google it. That way, when I finally ask again, I'm not starting from zero.

This habit compounds. Your future self will thank you, and your teammates will too.

5) Growth is the real goal

Engineering changes constantly. The only stable skill is learning.

If everything you do works on the first try, you're not stretching enough. Read docs. Try new tools. Break stuff (in dev). Reflect, learn, repeat.

Fail thoughtfully. Learn quickly.

Making life easier for the people around you through mentoring, learning, and innovating is what truly defines a senior engineer. Senior engineers don't avoid failure; they help their teams build systems and processes that survive it.