> Telling me to just be as useful as a generalist doesn't work when it was the specialization that made me worth listening to. It's a setup for failure.
True, you will fail to make the correct decision occasionally. But you and the article are making the same mistake. You are thinking failure is the end of the story. It's not.
As a senior engineer, you're goal isn't to make perfect decisions. Your goal is to learn how to make better designs over the long term. There is really only one way to do that. Make lots of design decisions, and find out which are best. The remainder (the bulk) will be failures. So if you aren't failing often you aren't moving forward.
Or to put if another way, if you refuse to commit because of fear of failure, you are refusing to move forward at the speed you should be moving.
A lot of things flow from that. Mistakes are costly, so you have to weed them out quickly (and consequently you learn from them rapidly). That means lots of visibility, it means finding ways to test ideas on small projects and not make one large "make or break" bet, it means change control so you aren't overwhelmed by your failures.
Ultimately it means engineering leadership, which is what a senior engineer should be doing is about knowing how many mistakes you should be making and how fast you can be making them. The answer isn't 0.