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Yep, the question of what makes a Senior developer always comes down to one thing. Can you make the people around you better! If you are doing that within your organization you are doing something right :)
In 25 years of experience at many companies, Senior Developer essentially boils down to OLDER developer
Older than someone fresh out of college, sure. I'm not sure I necessarily agree with the older you get, the better you are, though.
Yes - at the company I work for, most of the senior level developers are ones who have been in the industry for many years, but that doesn't necessarily mean they have senior-level skills. The reason they get to this level isn't because they've been programming since FORTRAN was the best thing around and they have all the knowledge in the world, it's because their employer felt it was necessary to promote them in order to keep them happy, because it's more expensive to lose and train a new employee than it is to keep him or her.
There's a reason why a lot of developers who have been at larger tech companies for years never make it past L4, because they simply never develop skills that the company feels makes them perform at that more senior level.
Yeaaaa - promotion to 'senior' to make sure they don't leave, or because they've been around too long. This is very dangerous, as it makes them feel like they know what they're doing when they don't.
Main reason I left my previous role is because of that. My boss hold promoting me for various reasons which none made any sense to me. He talked about age, being recently graduated and other non-sense stuff. I interviewed and got a job as senior developer in a larger company, then he was like this is my new offer and your role is senior.
At some points, we need to be promoted and it even made sense to him but he stopped me achieving what I needed to advance my career.
... or one who's changed jobs more often!
Very true. I'd even argue that the code you don't write is more important. That is code that you don't have to spend time on, that you don't have to maintain, and that isn't adding noise to your system. There's something soul-destroying about spending days/weeks/months on a feature, only to find out that no one really cared in the first place. Perhaps a senior developer is just someone who's experienced that enough times.
I do really enjoy reading your post! I ask your permission for borrowing this amazing statement “ What I do believe is that senior developers are meant to have an impact on their organization.“ I would say not only your organization but also having an impact on the product they are building
All my posts are 100% open source - feel free to borrow whatever you’d like! 🥳
Being able to think of problems and solutions from the business context, away from the code layer, is what makes a developer senior.
And then, it's also important for senior Devs to maintain empathy towards lower level developers. I was frustrated by a team lead, that was a senior developer cos he understood business requirements way more than I did, and was impatient to put me through 🤦🏽♂️
Great article.
I think one important aspect of a -true- Senior Developer is their ability to choose the correct tool/framework/library for the task to be done. And this knowledge usually comes from previous projects their worked on, so experience is important.
There are a lot of awesome tools, but the true is that nothing works for every case. Knowing what to choose is something that adds a lot of value and prevents spending unnecessary time.
hackernoon.com/why-senior-devs-wri...
Great read! 💯
Haha! love the cover image!
So, the cover image. Mate - Senior Developers tend to understand what's offensive and what's not. Not all the time. But in some cases - like this case... they would probably rethink the cover image.
Hey!
I didn’t mean to cause harm and I apologize - I’ll remove the cover image
It might be cultural differences (I’m Polish) but I personally do not find it offensive. I’d appreciate if you could elaborate via a DM or something
Yeah I can appreciate that :). I think, as a general rule, using images of a group of people to underscore an idea is almost always not a good thing. Culturally speaking I've completely screwed this up! If we ever meet in person I'll share a story about a slide I showed in Norway that went really wrong.
Funny enough, I ALSO discovered that Hitler downfall meme humour does not carry over from America to Germany during a presentation. I think if we're going to be public intellectuals, taking care of what our messaging implies and having the humility to admit we're wrong is a good way to take ownership for our actions.
Also, having the sensitivity think from different points of view never hurts and it's great that you did the work of explaining.
In any case - I’ve just removed it, it’ll probably take a while to update
One snowflake complains and you immediately bow and remove the picture..?
I'm offended by this.
Good article 👍