Your senior colleagues are routinely among the first to see problems—and their solutions—because your teammates ask them for help first. They hear sooner about new projects and other changes coming down the pike, because management tells them earlier. (In a large organisation they may even report higher up in the chain.) They interact more with peers in other teams, because that is part of the role. While junior engineers may be expected to be heads-down developing software most of the time, management allows senior engineers more time for gathering and synthesizing information. At first this is partially offset by increasing efficiency in development tasks, but the most-senior engineers may be expected to do nothing else.