| I have always cringed at the senior-junior distinction, especially because it is mostly espoused by those calling themselves senior, and that felt unnecessarily imperious. Any senior in any workplace is senior because of their specific and narrow experience in their particular role, over a sufficient amount of dedicated time. So it felt wrong to me to allow such a bifurcation of human ability with a senior-junior framing. The thing is, when some people employ the senior-junior language, they are implicitly referring to that very particular, unique, and narrow situation of the role-space they have found themselves in, and justifiably so. We are all juniors in a much larger space than we are seniors. Does it irk that someone is a senior in the nest they have made? It did, for me, but not anymore. “I tilled this field 17 times; I know it”, is a statement not only of knowing a single field (as opposed to any other fields), but also about some way of tilling. Without a universal standardization over behaviour, we’re all mostly junior mostly all of the time. Any claim of “senior”ness is therefore a claim of finding something cool in some narrow space. It’s worth listening to and extracting the value from such claims, if the practices therein are producing evidently worthy outcomes. That said, “senior” is a very small boat in a very large sea. Better to be aware and humble, no matter the efficacy of your current practices in your current environment. |