Comment by alexgotoi

There is no denying practice is needed, but... I've been doing this (getting to reduce ambiguity and simplify complex problems) since before my first job in free software communities, yet really, I wasn't anywhere close to "senior" when I joined my first job at a demanding SW organization at 22 years old.

There was simply a lot I did not know, but I had the talent to do this part well (sure, one can argue that I had "practice" doing this with any problem since I was ~10 years old, but calling that "senior" would be... over the top: I think it rather qualifies as "talent").

It took me a couple of years of learning good software engineering from my wonderful and smart senior colleagues and through my own failures and successes for me to become a Tech Lead too.

Disagree, it's not _just_ practice. You can do something for 10,000 hours but never actively try to improve. Does that mean you're now more senior because you had more volume of practice?

e.g, let's say someone spends 10k hours doing just 'addition and subtraction' problems on 2 digit numbers. Are they now better at maths than someone who spent 0.1k hours but doing a variety of problems?

To grow as a software engineer, you need to have volume + have this be outside of your comfort zone + actively try to improve/challenge yourself.

Apart from this, I do agree it's not 'innate talent' that drives someone to become a senior engineer, and I think anyone with the right attitude / mindset can do so.

being senior is clearly about having certain abilities or skills and absolutely nothing to do with how long it took you to acquire those skills