At what point would you consider a developer to not be a junior anymore? Have you seen candidates applying for a junior position and thought: this person should be applying for a more advanced position?
I started writing software in 1984. Over the years I worked with many languages, technologies, and tools. I have been in leadership positions since the early 2000s, and in executive roles since 2014.
That is an excellent question. Unfortunately, I don't think that there is a simple formula. I have seen developers with 2 years of work experience on their resume who are stronger than people with 5 years of experience.
It mostly depends on what people did with their time, how much they coded during their schooling, etc. For example, a developer who built desktop applications on windows machines for 5 years is a very junior dev when it comes to distributed systems. They'd be able to pick that up, but it would take a couple of years before being proficient.
If I had to oversimplify I'd go with this definition:
A developer is no longer junior once they accumulated 10,000 hours of coding non-trivial projects using at least two different OO, imperative or functional languages AND if they have a good grasp of CS fundamentals.
10,000 hours is about 4.7 years of full-time employment if one started coding for the first time on their first day of work. Clearly, that's never the case. People start learning much earlier than their first day on the job. So, you can imagine that studying computer science in college and working on personal projects could give you a few thousand hours of experience even before start working.
Now... I have seen what I call "senior-junior" developers who have worked for 10 years on one single dialog box in a Microsoft application. Those folks have many years of experience but tend to be very unprepared because they have been relegated to that little niche for so long.
I have also seen "junior-senior" developers, who have very little work experience but are wizards at their craft.
Difficult question! I'll need to think more about this one, but I hope my rumbling help shed some lights on my personal way of looking at it.
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At what point would you consider a developer to not be a junior anymore? Have you seen candidates applying for a junior position and thought: this person should be applying for a more advanced position?
That is an excellent question. Unfortunately, I don't think that there is a simple formula. I have seen developers with 2 years of work experience on their resume who are stronger than people with 5 years of experience.
It mostly depends on what people did with their time, how much they coded during their schooling, etc. For example, a developer who built desktop applications on windows machines for 5 years is a very junior dev when it comes to distributed systems. They'd be able to pick that up, but it would take a couple of years before being proficient.
If I had to oversimplify I'd go with this definition:
10,000 hours is about 4.7 years of full-time employment if one started coding for the first time on their first day of work. Clearly, that's never the case. People start learning much earlier than their first day on the job. So, you can imagine that studying computer science in college and working on personal projects could give you a few thousand hours of experience even before start working.
Now... I have seen what I call "senior-junior" developers who have worked for 10 years on one single dialog box in a Microsoft application. Those folks have many years of experience but tend to be very unprepared because they have been relegated to that little niche for so long.
I have also seen "junior-senior" developers, who have very little work experience but are wizards at their craft.
Difficult question! I'll need to think more about this one, but I hope my rumbling help shed some lights on my personal way of looking at it.