Staff augmentation only
works when the seniors
are senior.

Draft in preparation. A long-form treatment is forthcoming; below is the working outline our editors are circulating.

Working outline

1. The market’s seniority inflation problem. Five-year engineers labelled principal, ten-year staff engineers labelled “architect-equivalent.”
2. What a real senior actually does on a pod. Sets the bar on the first PR. Refuses the wrong ticket. Calls out the missing test before the sprint ends.
3. How we screen. Pair-coding under load. A walked code review. A real architectural disagreement.
4. The augment-vs-replace decision. When to add a senior to a client team versus build a pod that owns an outcome.
5. The honest math. Two real seniors beat a five-person “blended” team on every quality metric we measure.