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Crossing the senior chasm

Jen Chan on October 26, 2023

Until you're working well and closely with senior devs, you might not know you're ready to take on senior or staff level challenges! For some, att...
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Ingo Steinke

In my personal experience, the senior title has been quite meaningless in most companies. And if you don't get a "senior" promotion by your boss, you can still call yourself senior whenever you want. I wouldn't recommend doing that after 1 month out of bootcamp, but from 2 years of professional experience, anyone can be called a senior, and it still does not say much about their specific expertise, skills, and responsibilities.

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Vince

The most important change in mindset is accepting that you, and everyone around you, is dumb about something. Knowing you do not know something, and accepting that, is liberating outside of software engineering as well.

Knowing my coworker is much more adept at some task/skill/language/concept than myself, and delegating to their expertise - is just as important as being in the position of that coworker in some other area.

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Jen Chan

Yep we all have different strengths, and given enough time someone with many years less experience would be teaching me about an area I don't know! Getting used to being uncomfortable and looking at things from a beginner's mindset is ongoing check for myself.