Omid Farhang
It happened to me this morning. After 15 years in the trenches—building frontend architectures, dipping into the backend, leading teams, and surviving countless framework wars—I hit a wall. Not a technical wall, but a conceptual one.
I realized I didn’t know what Corepack was. I’ve never actually used Yarn. I’ve heard of test‑managers and code‑generation tools like Orval, but I’ve never managed to actually run one in a production pipeline.
At first, the feeling was a sharp mix of guilt and sadness. How can I be a “Senior” or a “Lead” and miss things that seem so trivial to others? But then I zoomed out. I stopped looking at my specific lane—the features, the bugs, the immediate sprint—and looked at the entire ecosystem.
That’s when it hit me: My issue isn’t that I don’t know these things. It’s that I don’t know what I don’t know.
If you’re a senior developer feeling this “imposter syndrome” creep in after a decade of success, this post is for you. We aren’t falling behind; we are just victims of the Specialist’s Paradox.
The Specialist’s Paradox
When you’ve been in the game for 15 years, you become incredibly efficient at solving problems within your stack. You build deep “muscle memory.” However, that depth often comes at the cost of peripheral vision.
The ecosystem moves at light speed. While we were busy ensuring our enterprise apps didn’t break during the last three migrations, an entire world of tooling (like Vite, PNPM, or Bun) matured behind our backs.
The Reality Check: Being a senior isn’t about knowing every tool in the shed; it’s about knowing how to build the house. But every now and then, we need to check if there’s a better hammer available.
The “I Don’t Know What I Don’t Know” Problem
This is the scariest part for a lead. How do you find the gaps in your knowledge if you don’t even know the gaps exist?
1. The Real-World Example: The Build Tool Blindness
Imagine you’ve been using npm since 2012. It works. Why change? Then you join a new project and see Corepack mentioned in the package.json. You feel behind.
- The Lesson: You didn’t “fail” to learn Corepack. You simply haven’t had a problem that required it yet. In a senior role, we often wait for a “pain point” before adopting a tool. Younger devs often adopt the tool first, then find the problem.
2. Where to Look for Essentials
If you feel lost in the sea of “what’s modern,” stop Googling randomly. Use structured maps:
- Roadmap.sh: This is the gold standard. Look at the “Frontend” or “Backend” roadmaps. Don’t look at them to feel bad; look at them as a checklist. If you see a bubble you don’t recognize, that’s your research topic for the week.
- The “State of JS/CSS” Surveys: These annual reports show what the industry is actually using versus what is just “hype.”
The Technical Essentials Checklist
For my fellow leads and seniors who feel they’ve missed some “trivial” modern basics, here is a high-level pulse check. Don’t panic if you don’t know these—just mark them for a 15-minute read later.
| Category | The “Modern” Standard | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Package Management | Corepack, PNPM | Faster installs, disk space efficiency, and version consistency. |
| Build Tooling | Vite, ESBuild | Moves away from the “heavy” Webpack days for instant HMR. |
| Testing & Code‑gen | Vitest, Playwright, Orval | Modern test runners and generation tools that speed up validation and client generation. |
| Runtime / DX | TypeScript (Strict Mode) | If you’re still on “Loose” TS or JS, this is the #1 priority. |
| Infrastructure | Docker/Containerization | Understanding how your code lives in the cloud, not just your browser. |
Solutions: How to Keep Up Without Burning Out
You can’t learn it all. If you try, you’ll burn out in a month. Instead, try these “Senior-friendly” habits:
- The “Tooling Spike” Friday: Dedicate one hour every two weeks to try a tool you’ve never used. Don’t build a project; just try to install it and run a “Hello World.”
- Listen to “Peripheral” Podcasts: Shows like Syntax.fm or JS Party discuss the ecosystem broadly. You don’t need to master the topics, but hearing the keywords helps eliminate the “I don’t know what I don’t know” factor.
- Read “The Staff Engineer’s Path” by Tanya Reilly: This book is incredible for seeing the “big picture” of the ecosystem and your role within it.
- Admit it to your team: I told my team I didn’t know about Corepack. You know what happened? They taught me. It built trust. It showed them that being “Senior” means being a professional learner, not a walking encyclopedia.
Final Thoughts
It’s okay to feel sad when you realize the world has moved while you were working hard. But remember: Your 15 years of experience gave you the wisdom to use these tools correctly. A junior might know how to run a test-manager, but you know what to test to keep a multi-million dollar business running.
Zooming out is painful because the view is so big. But once your eyes adjust, you’ll realize you’re not behind—you’re just getting started on the next level.