Naur's essay is not about time spent in the field, which is what 'senior' usually means; it's about time spent on a particular team.
Could’ve just explained it in less words.
Junior dev: Make me a sandwich.
Senior dev: We’re building a sandwich. It needs a roasted tomato, thin sliced, X mm in thickness. Add some bacon. I want mayonnaise but it needs to be feature gated.
One sandwich later. . .
Senior dev: where’s my bread man?
I noticed that. If I don't write the code myself I only develop a very shallow mental model of what's doing. But I guess that always has been the product managers perspective.
I reference this paper all the time, it completely changed the way I think about software.
I agree with the ideas at a high level, but not sure if we can tag people as “Junior” and “Senior” and make these broad strokes about how they think.
We should think of it in terms of “Theory Builders” and “Just get it done-ers”, and think of them as states of mind, rather than a character trait, or something linked to years of experience.
You may have a theory builder straight out of university (after all many go on to do a PhD straight away!), or a theory builder who has the mindset and just came in from a different profession. Or an 8 year old theory builder! You may have someone with 10 years experience writing code who still slings code.
You may also have one person who was a Theory Builder on Monday, and became a "Get it done-er" by Friday due to a deadline.