On Systems Thinking

Junior engineers think in features. Senior engineers think in systems.

The difference isn't intelligence or experience. It's the mental model. Feature-thinking asks "how do I implement X?" Systems-thinking asks "what happens to the rest of the system when X exists?"

Developing systems-thinking takes deliberate practice:

• Read postmortems — for the chain of causation
• Draw the diagram — before you write code
• Ask "what happens when this fails?" — for every component
• Think about time — data gets stale, caches expire, clocks drift