In this week's Ladybug Podcast episode we chatted about the skills it takes to level up from a junior to a senior developer.
Junio...
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Senior developper means experience.
Seeing senior developper and 6 month experience is antinomic.
You can be a lead dev within 6 month in an inexperienced team, but that does not mean you are senior. It just happens you are the most talented.
If some managers want to call this position senior, good for them. But it does not make it true .
True enough. On the other hand, having 10 years worth of experience doesn't automatically make you a senior developer (if the term is to denote more than just the number of days you've been staring at a screen).
Agreed well said.
I add :
Knowledge in every topic in your field.
Being able to mentor juniors.
Understand the business around you ( not just the code ).
Handle pressure in a creative way.
Solve complex problems with easy manner.
I know some seniors indeed do this, but in what way is it a necessary requirement for being considered a senior developer?
Do we really need to waste time on those namings? It's just a name, if I'm getting paid enough and it doesn't limit me in my day-to-day work, then I'm fine getting called junior my whole life, even with 10 years of professional experience. Some of people pay attention to that, but that's just naming. Some of the companies compensate bad salary/atmosphere/projects with titles, which in the end are just about prefixing your title with a single word on LinkedIn. Is it really worth it?
I don't really like that, that's why I would be happy to call everyone developers or software engineers etc. It simply fixes a problem with correct naming and finding out, who is senior developer, which in the end doesn't really matter, because everyone has his own definition (as you can see in discussion here).
Very edifying article, It reflects the current expectations from a senior developer very well. Also shows where this industry is going which is not necessarily a good thing. In the past there was no such position like "senior" developer. Seniority in the classical sense is simple a matter of age, maybe meant that somebody who was on a job for a long time and had the experience to do it well. Nowadays it is getting more and more not clear what does it mean to be a "senior". Actually I do not think that somebody after 1 month experience could possibly become a senior even if it has the best soft skills possible. This the new trend in this industry and actually nowadays the soft skills that makes somebody senior after 1 month and not the real hard tech skill. You can decide if it is a good or bad tendency. Also I really do not agree with a lot of soft skill that we need to possess now. Before development was more about doing and less about talking and actually I liked it better that way Software development is highly technical area, I would say it needs a lot of hard technical skill, and classically software developers were good at that and not talking which is in opposite a soft skill. Nowadays you have to explain the why too much for people, maybe it is because there are more and more people who need explanation to often and it is maybe because of their lack of right education in the area, and huge lack of hard technical skills that is really needed to do this job. Writing books and talking public is very different from writing code. Before people understand this more when there was only machine code to write software. Nowadays with these high level program languages the classical way of doing this job is dying out and gets replaced with people who only good at soft skills, but actually you can see what kind of software is the output of this process. I would give these people more chance to write software in machine code to get to know more computers and machines which is actually this job is all about. Let them replace some soft skills with some hard one.
What about software engineer ? I see in LinkedIn some people with low experience (2 years )call himself as software engineer , is it true? Is it depends on number of language that he know and level of language proficiency , or other things ?
Software Engineer is a job title, and in my opinion there is no contradiction being a Junior Software Engineer.
When a baker starts his carrier he's probably at its lowest in term of skills, he's still a baker though.
Thanks, good explanation
That's a good list, even though I assume that "problem solving" is a basic skill at any level. Devs without problem solving won't stay devs for long...let alone become seniors.
Some time ago I put together "5 mistakes stopping you from becoming a senior dev" video on youtube. What do you think? Does it make sense? youtu.be/LjrLBkxHUFg
Thanks for the article, it was a good read!
One thing I would point out that you did not touch is the fact that being titled as "senior" does not always mean the same. There are different companies with different needs for talent and different assessments on you. So being a senior in one company does not necessarily make you a senior in other company's terms.
This is also the first impression I get when I'd hear someone becoming a senior in 6 months -- that is just the title, which most probably has been a premature promotion.
I would add two things:
Reliability/Accountability: You need to have a track record of getting things done when you promised they would be done, showing up when you say you will, and not screwing things up. Senior engineers nuke deployments sometimes (rarely), but they know how to roll back within the deployment window or resolve things, whereas a more junior developer would not even be trusted to deploy to such systems. At the end of the day, you need to get your work done.
Along with communication, being able to convey business value is indispensable. If I tell a team we need to use (INSERT NEW JS FRAMEWORK HERE) because it is trending and all the cool kids use it, no one cares above me. I need to make a business case that adopting this technology will benefit the business - increased productivity, larger talent pool, killer competitive advantage, etc. Understanding the needs of the business and their risks is crucial. You may need to spend a weekend making a proof of concept on your own time if it means a lot to you.
I feel that Communication and Mentorship quite subjective expectations from developers.
I'm not saying that it's bad or useless skills, however, I know really great and experienced developers which are not good at this, but it doesn't make them worse. On other hand, I know Juniors who are great at explaining and have this ability to mentor others even when they are Juniors on their's own.
Worth reading !!
All of this is absolutely true. I'd add that mentoring and teaching is probably the most important of that set.
How to measure seniority:
Rare skills.
Years of experience.
How to compare two senior developers?
A great article on motivation that contains valuable advice.
Thanks for the blog post on 5 Things You Need to become a Senior Developer
Very well written. Thank you.
thanks for this one :)
100% agree with you.
By observing senior developers from different companies, I should add "the ability to understand business requirements" and "Project management skills".