I have 25 years of experience as a professional developer, and 40 years of experience in total. I have been Head of Development, Project Lead, CTO,...
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This is an interesting perspective. I agree that junior devs sometimes focus on things that senior devs have rightfully learned to ignore. "Boring" tech is boring for a reason - it's an effective way to solve a problem. SQL and jQuery are great examples of tech that gets bashed for being boring, but you can still solve problems very effectively with them. They're reliable and understandable tools.
I'm not sure Joel was necessarily criticizing all the higher levels of abstractions and tools that come out, though - I think he was pointing out that you'll never get anything done if you spend all your time running down every hot, new tech solution that comes out. Just my take, though, and it is an excellent article. :-)
To get back to the main subject, the seniors I've known that I felt truly deserved their title have had superior debugging skills, superior ability to read through, understand, and reason about other people's code, a good sense for what makes maintainable code, a greater technical skill set (knowledge of the language/ecosystem, how to solve its problems) and the ability to teach those skills to others. Wouldn't you say that these skills are really part of being a senior dev too?
Point well made, though. Always follow the money!
Of course. Some new tech is interesting.
Yes, and of course I am exaggerating - The point still stands ... ^_^
The difference between junior and senior is responsibility. A junior isn't responsible for anything. A intermediate is responsible for their own work. A senior is responsible for mentoring, product design, and the whole product. You don't learn it all in a day.
This is of course true, but you never learn it if you keep on chasing all the "latest new tech stuff" ...
Sure buddy, sure!
I think it's not all about speed of delivery. Just because you provide a solution fast it does not mean it's good. I would much rather that you spend a bit more time and deliver a robust system, than delivering a inferior product in half the time.
Even if the delivered system is powerfull and cool I would not make you a senior because of that, that's bullshit!
Actually, you're wrong. Speed leads to quality. However, thank you for the comment, you gave me an idea for my next article ^_^
Would you mind expanding on why you think that?
The experiment with pottery shows that if you create 10 pots in the same time as somebody creates 1 pot, you end up creating better quality at the end of the time frame. Hence, more speed, better quality in the end, and more learning ...
This makes no sense to me if i'm completely honest... do you mean that by doing 10x more work you're learning 10x faster, hence becoming 10x better at what you do? That could make sense, but I still think that spending a bit more time on something results in a better product
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