Senior vs Junior. A 2-Year Dev Thinks Like a Senior. A 10-Year Dev Doesn't.

I've seen 10-year developers who think like juniors and 2-year developers who think like seniors. The real difference has nothing to do with how long you've been coding. Junior mindset: how do I CODE this? Senior mindset: SHOULD we build this? The actual difference between senior and junior thinking, with a real example where the "junior" approach took 2 weeks and the "senior" approach took 2 hours - for the same outcome. Junior thinking: "How do I code this feature?" Focus on syntax, focus on the latest framework, focus on looking smart in code review. Every problem is a coding problem. The solution is always more code. Senior thinking starts before a single line gets written: "Should we build this at all?" What's the simplest solution? What breaks at scale? Seniors solve business problems. Juniors solve coding problems. The real example: feature request comes in - users want data export. Junior (past me, honestly) would spend two weeks building a complete export system - custom formats, queue processing, progress bars, the whole thing. A senior engineer on my team asked one question: "What format do they actually want?" Answer: Excel. She added a CSV download button in two…