I really liked this! I will also have to think on it more.<p>However, I think you sell the initial idea short - that seniority DOES ultimately boil down to direction required / direction provided.<p>The only place this summary would fall short are in those people who can bust out anything on their own in record time, but have trouble with teams... and even they provide direction, if only by setting a technical direction/example.<p>When you expand to the venn diagram, you're elaborating on the <i>kinds</i> of direction that can required or provided, but that core remains - that ultimately, seniority happens as you go from needing direction to providing it.<p>Now, within in different industries, the points within each circle can change (compare startups, where now is better than perfect, to industrial plants, where perfect is better than now, to research, where now and perfect are sacrificed to hard and novel).<p>I'd say it's even likely that, given a different culture and/or problem domain and/or ???, you get different circles entirely - although it's hard to argue with "ability to do the job", "ability to work with others" and "ability to cause direction". What are things that <i>don't</i> fit into one of those?