Stepping Into the Gap
A senior engineer on my team is leaving. Not leaving the company - just moving to another group internally. On paper, it's a lateral move that doesn't change much for the rest of us. In practice, it changes a lot.
This person was the one who spoke up on calls. When someone asked how a particular piece of the system worked, they had the answer. When a design discussion stalled because nobody was sure about the right approach, they'd offer a direction. When something felt off about a proposed change, they'd say so. Not in a dramatic way - just clearly, with enough context that people could make a decision and move on.
Now someone else has to do that. Probably several someone elses, across different areas of the codebase. And for most of them, it'll be the first time they've been in that position.
The knowledge is there. The people on this team have been in the codebase, debugged the weird edge cases, sat in enough design reviews to have real opinions. What they haven't had to do is be the person who volunteers those opinions in a meeting with fifteen people on the call. The senior person handled that part. Everyone else could sit back, nod, add a detail here and there, and the conversation still moved forward because someone else was driving it.
That's the part that's about to change. If nobody speaks up when someone proposes something that won't work, the meeting just moves on. If a newer engineer asks a question about how the system handles a particular flow and the room stays quiet, the answer doesn't come. Someone either figures it out later on their own or builds the wrong thing.
The technical knowledge isn't the hard part. The hard part is the feedback side - being the person who says "I don't think that's the right approach" or "we tried something like that before and it didn't go well." It's related to learning to say no - pushing back takes a kind of confidence that most people haven't had to exercise yet, because someone else was doing it for them.
What I keep thinking about is that nobody needs them to be the person who left. That person had years of experience and their own way of communicating. What the team actually needs is just people willing to say something when it matters. It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to come with the same authority. It just has to come from someone.
I've already seen it start to happen. On the last couple of calls, people who would have stayed quiet before are answering questions, offering opinions on design choices. It's a little tentative - you can tell they're not sure if they're overstepping. But nobody reacts that way. The conversation just keeps moving, which is probably the whole point. When someone fills a gap, people don't stop to applaud. They just stop noticing it was there.
Someone will give a wrong answer at some point. Someone will push back on something that turns out to be fine. That's going to happen regardless. But a team where nobody speaks up drifts in a way that's hard to correct later. An occasional wrong answer is a much better problem to have than a room full of silence.
So the gap is getting filled, a little at a time. Not by one person stepping into the role, but by a few people realizing that the role was never one person's job to begin with. It just felt that way because someone was good enough at it that the rest of us never had to try. But these people only have opinions worth sharing because they spent years on the team absorbing context - which is why it matters that you keep hiring junior engineers. The next senior person will leave eventually, and someone needs to have been around long enough to step up.