The terminal closes slowly.
First it’s one meeting. Then a few more. Then you’re “senior” and your calendar is the job. Code reviews replace coding. Strategy replaces shipping. You advise. You guide. You no longer build. Seen this happen. Almost happened to me.
The problem is not the meetings. The problem is losing touch with the trade. Architecture diagrams don’t show you the queries that fan out under load. Sprint planning doesn’t show you the retry logic that fails silently. You can’t review what you can’t recognize.
I was reviewing a PR once. New endpoint, looked clean, tests passed. I approved it. A week later we had a performance incident – the ORM was generating five queries where one join would do. I’d read the code and missed it because I hadn’t written a query myself in months. The pattern is obvious to anyone in the code daily. I wasn’t.
Seniority should mean you’ve seen more failure modes. Not that you’ve forgotten how to find them.
I stay in the code. Not all of it. But enough. Enough to know what’s actually hard. Enough to smell when something is off. Enough to debug an incident without relearning the codebase.
You never know how deep the water is from the shore.