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Your job title is what you do, not who you are

Adam K Dean on January 24, 2020

I just read an interesting post, "Become a mature developer, not a senior developer" by Daniel Irvine in which he encourages you to become a mature...
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Sumant H Natkar

For me at least job title is important, although right now I work as an full stack developer, but I am definitely aiming for the lead role, where I have a team to work with.

Also a role defines how much responsibility you can handle, because you can't expect a junior developer to take ownership of the whole application.

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Adam K Dean

Exactly, as a full stack developer, your responsibilities will be quite broad in terms of the application — frontend, backend, and anything in-between — but as your role grows, so too will your responsibility. As you become the lead, either of a team, a project, or a system, your responsibilities will be in a leadership position, whether that's technical, managerial, or a bit of both.

In both cases, your job title is your role, not your self-worth. Job titles are important, absolutely, because we can aim to better ourselves, but we should never look down upon others for holding roles such as junior. Today's junior could be tomorrows lead, and today's lead was likely yesterday's junior.

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Sumant H Natkar

Fully agree regarding never look down on people who are in a role junior to you.

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Cat

it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking they simply refer to experience, but when you look at the larger list, it becomes apparent that they refer to your role within an organisation.

I definitely fell into that trap. I'm wondering how different companies view their junior/senior roles in relation to their employee?

After reading this article, I realize I need to reshape my views on what "seniority" is and what it means to a company. Adding it to my list of questions to ask an interviewer.

This is such an uplifting article! Thank you for writing it.

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Thomas H Jones II

Heh... When people ask me my title, I usually answer "I don't really know". This is actually the truth: I work for a consulting company and our internal titles (I think mine is "Senior Principal Consultant", but I'd have to look at our org-chart) can vary markedly from the titles we assume when working for a given client or partner.

Ultimately, I tend to refer to myself as variants "IT janitor" or "Chaos Wrangler" as I'm a true jack-of-all trades ("what do you need me to be, today"). My corporate Slack profile has me as "Chaos Custodian", my LinkeIn profile has me as "System Wrangler" and I've used other variants on other sites.

And, to be honest: 1) as long as I'm getting paid for what I bring to the table, titles mean little to me – and far less to me than the work I'm engaged in means; 2) most titles are pretty generic, vague and/or meaningless (even early in my career, I found myself outperforming people with years more experience and much higher titles, so, "what's in a name?").

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Kaleb M

Very true! I feel that even comparing titles across different companies doesn't work, because it's an apples to oranges comparison at times. The importance is knowing what your responsibilities are and doing your best to meet them or exceed (for promos :D)

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Hibrit Usta

thank you for this beautiful article.

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Adam K Dean

You're most welcome 🙏🏻

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Hibrit Usta

We're [I'm] glad to be here🙏