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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1389 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 12, 2026

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Has anyone managed to switch from "problem solving" mode to "problem setting?"

I've gotten pretty good at solving problems in my line of work, but I find that I end up hyper focused on particular parts of the whole and frequently lose perspective on the overall situation. I work with a lot of people much smarter than me, but it seems that their advantage over me doesn't come from being better at solving a problem that's in front of them but rather from coming up with new projects that significantly improve the overall situation. They seem to have a kind of big picture view that allows them to say "we're missing X" or "we should do X instead of Y" in a way that reframes the problem or picks up on something people were ignoring.

My default suspicion is that these people just have the stuff that I'm missing, but I'm curious if someone here has managed to reframe their thinking along these lines.

sounds similar to the transition from senior software engineer to staff engineer, and at a lesser level from SWE to senior SWE. I highly recommend https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-archetypes/ to anyone to see what kind of staff they would be, if your company support you being even better at problem solving and there's a career path for that, "The Solver" archetype is not necessarily bad.

As for the distinction between "problem solving" vs "problem setting", I think it's just opening your mind up to the kinds of problems that can be solved and that one would have agency on, problems are problems no matter whether they are technical, social, or political. https://www.noidea.dog/glue (Being Glue) might give you some insight on the direction of this.

Personal anecdote, I think one moment in which my boss noticed that I am senior SWE and not just SWE was once in a meeting when my boss boss (so my skip) was essentially harshly criticizing someone else, I stepped in and pointed out that the person was ill-equipped to handle the situation, and seeing as there is lack of time and resources to get them up to speed, the problem should be handled by someone else, namely a different senior SWE or me and that we can work on the post-problem docs afterwards. The temperature dropped almost immediately. My boss did a 1-1 with me afterwards and was especially thankful of how I was able to gracefully handle that. This is obviously not a staff-level contribution (it was more just matching the right technical person to the right problem and the comfortableness to speak up), but that's the kind of direction in which I am growing.

Thanks, that guide has a lot of helpful stuff.

At least in my career, the difference between problem solving and problem setting seems to come down to recognizing that multiple problems are actually one problem, and that the problem in question is usually a political one rather than a technical one.

I mostly recognized that by staying at one place for long enough to catch on. There might be shortcuts.

I would say that I began my career doing more problem solving, and I try to retain some of that, but I do a lot more problem setting now. Do you have any specific questions?

Not being sure what you're looking for, I'd maybe say, "You can just do things." Nothing is really stopping you from thinking deeply about the "why" of what you're doing. The scope of your thinking may be limited by the number of folks you can influence into working on the problems you think should be set. There are more formal ways to be able to exert such influence (e.g., you're given some sort of formal authority over resources/people who pretty much have to follow the direction you set), but informal methods work pretty well, too (e.g., you persuade others over time that they should pay attention to the concerns you pose, especially as they see examples of how you posed a problem and it led to important results).

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