On Systems Thinking
Why the best engineers think in systems, not features — and how to develop that lens.
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:
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Read postmortems— for the chain of causation
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Draw the diagram— before you write code
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Ask "what happens when this fails?"— for every component
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Think about time— data gets stale, caches expire, clocks drift