What do you believe defines a senior software engineer in today's rapidly evolving industry? Share your insights and discuss the skills and qualities you think are essential for senior-level positions.
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Top comments (10)
Good question! I think there are 5 distinctive characteristics:
Boldness & Leadership. Senior developers are not afraid of complex problems, the more complex problems tend to be, the more interesting and motivating they are to tackle. Furthermore, when production is down or a major roadblock occurs, the senior dev should be the go-to guy/gal. He/She takes ownership of the challenge at hand and "steers the ship to safety".
Experience. You need to have at least 5 years of solid experience in diverse tasks within your domain. This means sharpening your skills on side projects as well and not relying on just your 9-5.
Domain knowledge. You need to strive towards mastery, not just building something that works, but understanding the deep technical implications of side effects, business impact, and technical depth. Furthermore, constant updating of skills by learning new languages/tools, reading books, or taking courses.
Mentorship. You should be looking at your team and the ways you can positively impact each developer so that they grow into a senior like you one day.
Adaptive. You could be a Django developer for 5 years, and then suddenly be thrown Laravel. Senior developers are skilled enough to easily adapt to the task at hand.
Interesting, good answer
Very good answer, Kevin! Totally, agree
Great answer <3
Over my 26 years in this field, I have learned that these distinctions are largely meaningless. Experience is valuable, but given how many senior roles allow for folks with fewer than five years experience I don’t think that these titles really express experience.
Unfortunately, I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re largely meaningless. If someone’s proud of their title, I’m happy for them, but the title your employer gives you does not define you.
In ten years, most of us will be working somewhere else. What we do today at work will be lost to us, and we will need to find a way of building our own career on our own terms.
First of all, those classifications are mostly of organizational matter. One might already be at a more advanced level without bearing the title or get the title before you reach the level of proficiency.
That being said, you can roughly categorize three levels based on their main goals and requirements:
Unskilled Juniors improve their own skills with the goal of writing good software.
Once they advance, having reached sufficient skills, they will improve their methods in order to improve their writing of software inside their team.
Later, they become experienced Seniors and improve their teams, its processes and methods to enable everyone to become even better at writing software.
Senior Software Engineers are seasoned experts in the field of software development. They possess extensive experience and skills in software design, development, testing, and maintenance. Not only do they have solid coding capabilities, but they also possess comprehensive qualities in team leadership, project management, and technical architecture design.
To become a senior software engineer, one needs to put in continuous effort and accumulation. In addition to technical skills, it is also necessary to cultivate communication, collaboration, and leadership abilities.
1- Leadership: to be able to lead and instruct team members and especially new and junior ones.
2- communication skills: without the ability to communicate and conveying your ideas to the team members, you won't ever be a leader or a real senior.
3- proved domain experience
4- problem analysis and the skill of resolving it.
5- code review and correcting
Time prioritization is also worth mentioning. It's nice to be a developer that knows good practices, provides high-quality solutions, etc.
What a good senior developer should also know how to optimize his work and deliver a solid MVP in a reasonable time. Something like get-it-done with respect to the quality. Just my 5 cents 😛
The amount of sarcasm during dev talks 🤪 😅