Another aspect for which you might attribute this to more senior devs is in their ability to know how deeply they need to understand something in order to implement it.
A lot of times when I'm building something in a problem space I don't know very well, I like to keep guidelines loose, because I know that I'll be taking some leaps in development, and I know I'll be working in areas where I'm not fully competent.
For those reasons, it's hard for me to envision the project start to finish -- I'll know the general steps, but each implementation detail is a variably sized black hole that I can't peer into until I get deeper into it.
For things I'm more familiar with, I'm able to ask better questions, and more easily identify when something isn't going to work, or at least not work as expected. To the lay person, I appear dumber on the things I know better because I'm able to ask more specific questions, so I ask more of them until I'm 100% confident that I do understand, and generally, at that point I can just do what I'm supposed to. Where I'm less competent, I ask fewer questions up front, but then way more as I'm doing to make sure that what I've ended up with is going to meet expectations.
A lot of times when I'm building something in a problem space I don't know very well, I like to keep guidelines loose, because I know that I'll be taking some leaps in development, and I know I'll be working in areas where I'm not fully competent.
For those reasons, it's hard for me to envision the project start to finish -- I'll know the general steps, but each implementation detail is a variably sized black hole that I can't peer into until I get deeper into it.
For things I'm more familiar with, I'm able to ask better questions, and more easily identify when something isn't going to work, or at least not work as expected. To the lay person, I appear dumber on the things I know better because I'm able to ask more specific questions, so I ask more of them until I'm 100% confident that I do understand, and generally, at that point I can just do what I'm supposed to. Where I'm less competent, I ask fewer questions up front, but then way more as I'm doing to make sure that what I've ended up with is going to meet expectations.