Intro
Well… I’ll use the word “senior” a lot in this post, but it doesn’t really belong only to tech.
What I’m talking about isn’t a job title or a level on a career ladder. It’s a social pattern. “Senior” is just the label we use for people who’ve been around long enough.
You see this everywhere. Time passes, roles accumulate, and society quietly assumes improvement happened along the way.
Guess what? Most of the time, no one actually checks.
That’s the version of “senior” this post is really about.
So excuse me, lemme start …
When I first started in tech (around 12 years ago), senior professionals seemed infallible. They always appeared to know more, move faster, and navigate systems and problems with a confidence I didn’t have yet. Even though they weren’t even located in the same city or even close to my role… I assumed that working “closer” to them over time would automatically accelerate my learning. I wanted to be like them. I believed seniority itself meant mastery.
oh poor me
Reality Check
This is my point of view on how wrong that perception was. This post isnt meant to target individuals. It’s a reflection on the past, present, and future landscape of the field and, MORE BROADLY, how experience and status are interpreted by systems.
To frame this, Ill borrow a concept often called Game Theory.
Basically…
Game Theory helps identify the players in a system and what incentives drive them. Whether the situation is competitive or cooperative, each player has a role, constraints, and rewards. Thinking this way helps explain why certain behaviors persist, even when they don’t make much sense on the surface.
Main Arguments
Skill Stagnation
First of all…
Mastery decays if the world moves faster than you.
In cybersecurity, experience is valuable, but technology moves faster than any one person can track. AI, automation, new attack vectors, and shifting architectures make it extremely difficult… (to not say almost impossible) to stay fully up to date.
Mastery in this field is temporal. The skills that made someone a senior five years ago don’t automatically translate to today’s landscape. I respect experience, but lets recognize that technical relevance requires constant adaptation, which is constrained by BOTH time and personal priorities.
The point isn’t that their knowledge is irrelevant, but that technical skills aren’t static. A lot of people who were big names at Black Hat years ago now look like regular folks. That sounds exaggerated, but it really isn’t.
Yes, there are exceptions. A very small group of people were discovering things, building exploits, and creating techniques we still rely on today and most of us have no clue how they even came up with that stuff. Those people were far ahead, and some of them still are.
But that’s exactly the point: they are the exception, not the baseline. Lets finish the paragraph with an example.. Ask yourself: Could you create MIMIKATZ with the knowledge you have today? For most people who use Mimikatz daily, the honest answer is probably no (Seniors or not).
And this brings us back to the core argument: for the majority of seniors, time alone didn’t translate into deep, continuously updated technical skill. I’ll reinforce that with the next arguments.
Limited Mentorship
The one liner of the chapter is:
seniors are structurally unavailable for mentorship
As I mentioned in the Introduction, I imagined Seniors as patient sages, casually dropping knowledge bombs while I nodded. The reality is that most of them are too busy surviving the day-to-day chaos to teach anyone anything.
Meetings, incident response, audits, planning… their calendar is basically a minefield of “do not disturb” signs. The idea that a senior will have time to explain why a specific exploit works or how a mitigation actually blocks it is mostly a fantasy.
And its a fantasy not only that they will have time for you, but also that they actually know deeply what they are doing Lol
If you are or were in an environment that really helped you grow, lucky you. You can feel privileged, because thats not common.
So whats the point? There are people in companies with more than 10 years of experience. OK… But what does that actually mean? Ten years of deep technical work? Or ten years of meetings, abstractions, delegations, and high-level decisions?
At what level do they really know current technologies, threats, and architectures?
&& more importantly
- how useful is that knowledge/value to the team or the company in practice ??
Let’s keep going.
Shifting Priorities & Motivation
Stability changes how hard you are willing to push
Another thing I didnt fully understand when I was younger (guess this is what they call maturity) is how much life changes the game.
Most seniors are at a completely different stage. Family, kids, financial stability, responsibilities outside of work. And that’s fine…actually, that’s how it should be. But it changes priorities (and that directly supports my argument). Grinding until 2am, reading whitepapers for fun, reversing binaries on weekends… that phase usually doesn’t last forever.
Cybersecurity rewards obsession. Or better saying.. Success rewards obsession. The field moves so fast that staying sharp often requires borderline unhealthy levels of focus. Juniors usually still have that. Seniors, for very valid reasons, often don’t. One is hungry, trying to prove something. The other already proved it years ago.
This creates a weird imbalance. The junior is over-motivated, insecure, and constantly afraid of being irrelevant. The senior is stable, experienced, and optimizing for sustainability. Guess who is more likely to chase new techniques, break new tools, or spend nights testing weird ideas? Exactly.
Again, this isn’t a moral judgment. It’s a trade-off. But pretending motivation stays constant across decades in a field like cybersecurity or tech (or anything really) is just lying to ourselves. Experience accumulates, but raw drive often decays and sometimes thats enough for a motivated junior to outwork, outlearn, and outpace a senior.
And that’s uncomfortable to admit.
Market landscape
The market doesnt hire potential, it hires insurance
Lets think of WHY the companies dont want juniors..
Well, Its simple if we stop to think about it: juniors are risky, and mistakes cost money. On paper, seniors reduce that risk.
From a business point of view, the old guys “have seen things”. They are not gonna panic if something breaks, especially if it looks even slightly similar to something they’ve dealt with before. And thats comforting for management.
Even if they are not at the top of their technical game anymore, they feel predictable. And predictability is good for stakeholders.
Thats why the market keeps asking for more and more seniors. They dont wanna innovation, often its the opposite. Innovation brings problems, and problems mean instability.
So the system feeds itself. Companies demand seniors because they reduce perceived risk. People chase seniority because it buys stability and social validation.
Until now I layout:
- Skill stagnation due to rapid change
- Limited mentorship caused by role overload
- Shifting priorities and motivation
- Market incentives favoring predictability over potential
Lets go to conclusion
Conclusion / Game Theory / Real Senior Value
Last one-liner, I swear (I wanted some Nietzsche-level punch, but yeah… close enough):
People dont play the wrong game. They play the game that rewards them.
If you look at this through a Game Theory lens, one thing becomes clear: the system confuses time with competence.
Lets keep basic, the players (based on this post) are: juniors, seniors, companies, executives, regulators, but the rules are simple. The market rewards longevity, titles, and predictability, not continuous skill renewal.
Companies dont have time to train u on new technology. They need results now. They want return on investment as fast as possible.
- Experience does not mean depth
- Time does not mean learning.
Someone can spend ten years in a role doing calls, meetings, coordination, and “alignment,” instead of doing technical work. The system doesn’t care, because those years still convert into status, money, and authority.
This is not unique to cybersecurity. A barber who never learns modern cuts still gets called “experienced.” A driver who repeats the same safe route for twenty years is not automatically a better driver. Repetition without adaptation is just time passing.
Lets use Game Theory:
- Companies optimize for risk reduction
- Titles act as shortcuts
- “Senior” signals safety, even when it no longer means technical capability
- No one is incentivized to question it, because the label itself solves organizational problems
People chase seniority for the same reason. It brings money, stability, and power. Once reached, the incentive to stay sharp drops, because the system stops requiring it. And WHEN it does require it again, the answer usually isn’t “learn”, it’s “replace.”
So the critique isn’t that seniors are bad or lazy. It’s that the system rewards the label, not the capability. Technical skill becomes optional once status is secured… until a disruption shows up (yep, AI).
- Seniority is treated as proof of knowledge
- Experience is treated as proof of competence
- Neither assumption holds once you look past the title
But the system doesn’t care, until it suddenly does…
And thats the game we play