There are two shapes of senior engineer I've worked with my whole career. The depth-senior, who can take a hard subsystem and own it for five years. The chain-senior, who can take a problem from 'a customer mentioned this' all the way to 'it shipped, it billed, support knows about it.'
Both are real. Both are necessary. But chain-seniority has gotten quietly devalued in the last three years because it doesn't fit the FAANG interview loop, and now in the AI hiring cycle it's getting devalued again because it doesn't have a single tool name attached to it.
What chain-seniority looks like in practice
- Notices a support ticket pattern, traces it to a Postgres index, fixes it, writes the changelog, tells the support team in Swedish.
- Owns the dependency upgrade nobody else wants to schedule.
- Talks to legal about the cookie banner because nobody else will.
- Knows what the site looks like on a slow phone in Norrland.
I'd hire ten chain-seniors before I'd hire one specialist who needs an org around them to function. Especially now: agents make the typing cheap, but they do not make the chain shorter. Someone still has to walk the whole length of it.