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Jordi Enric
Jordi Enric

Posted on • Updated on • Originally published at jordienric.com

Signs that you're a Senior Software Engineer

Photo by Beth Macdonald on Unsplash

You're asked to review and merge pull requests

Half your day will be writing comments in PRs.

Sometimes you get a call from someone to clarify a comment, it becomes a 45-minute session where you open 12 Chrome Tabs, MS Paint and start drawing boxes and arrows.

You're spending more time in meetings than programming

The other half of your day will be participating in meetings. Sometimes you wonder if it's even necessary that you're there. Then a PM has an idea for a new feature, and you're glad you were there to advise them about it before they ignored you.

You're bald

Your body has decided to drop your hair to keep your brain cooled to do all the processing it has to do on a daily basis. You've received a letter from the world's bald association asking you to join their monthly meetings.

You're asked for your opinion when the team is making design decisions

You spend years learning and working hard to become someone who other people look up to. Now you are that person. It means more meetings.

You get called in the middle of the day randomly to give your input or answer questions no one else knows

They say "It will be 2 minutes" in their message. It becomes a 30-min call.

You're writing more documentation than coding

There was a time when you didn't even think where those docs came from. They were there from the beginning. You never stopped to think who wrote that. Now it's on you.

You realize that no one teaches you how to write docs. Docs are one of the most important aspects of great codebases. Yet nobody really teaches you or prepares you to write good docs.

You still feel like a newbie

Your feeling of knowledge oscillates between "I know everything" and "I don't know shit"

meme

You're asked to do presentations

Sometimes you think using Comic Sans is fun because it pisses off the designers.

You have a stash of memes from the internet to add to your presentations. You only do the presentation to show the memes.

You realize coding skills are not everything

Helping other teammates, devs or not. Sharing what you know. Trying to create a good environment for everyone to work in. Being a good person. Those things are more important than knowing how to implement an A* Algorithm

I'm sure I'm missing a lot of things. If you can come up with one please share in the comments 👇

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Top comments (35)

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malikkillian profile image
MalikKillian

Also, you come up with more and more reasons not to code things (as a team). Junior Devs usually see every problem as an unwritten script or function, but Senior Devs will suggest a change in process or leveraging vendor tools instead of homegrown solutions. At the end of the day, the most secure, performant, and maintainable code is the code you never write.

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phase_seven profile image
Ratul Roy

It seems so counter intuitive! Maybe I'm just not ready for a senior * position

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jordienr profile image
Jordi Enric

True, thanks for sharing :)

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nikhil27b profile image
Nikhil Bobade

Also senior developer search of how to get date in javascript

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jordienr profile image
Jordi Enric

I have a bookmark

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fjones profile image
FJones

I just grab my old date handling lib, gloss over it with the latest applicable standards, and drop it into /utils, because I'm past convincing there might be a better native solution any time soon...

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dastasoft profile image
dastasoft

I got very confused about the hair thing, fingers crossed for that 😂.

The most important point I think is "You realize coding skills are not everything", especially because when we start we are so focused on the technical part and at the end of the day, we love it but yes, it's not everything especially within a team.

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jordienr profile image
Jordi Enric

I believe it too. Technical skills become secondary with time.

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mwrpwr profile image
Joseph Maurer

I can relate with being asked to give input on how something is implemented. It always seems like it is going to be fast and then hours later you realize that you've been doing a deep dive into why something is constructed the way it is. Great Post 👏

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jordienr profile image
Jordi Enric

Thank you!

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nhatnguyentim profile image
Hoang Nhat

Almost all of them, except the Bald. I guess I am not a Senior already haha.

Btw, thanks for sharing 🙌🏻

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jordienr profile image
Jordi Enric

These are just signs you don't have to fit all of them. I still have hair too 😎

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nhatnguyentim profile image
Hoang Nhat

Love to hear that 🙌🏻

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omrisama profile image
Omri Gabay

This post left me confused because I can relate to some and not to others! 😅

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jordienr profile image
Jordi Enric

Me too I still have hair

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pacheco profile image
Thiago Pacheco

I am just afraid about the hair part, especially because my hair is starting to get like Vegeta’s hair shape

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jordienr profile image
Jordi Enric

I'd worry if you get the letter from the world's bald association 👨‍🦲

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donnaken15 profile image
Wesley

I guess I'm not a good senior software engineer (but I am)
I only fit maybe 2 criteria

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jordienr profile image
Jordi Enric

Remember these are just signs not a list of criteria. I still have hair 👨‍🦲

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rebaiahmed profile image
Ahmed Rebai

Also teaching Junior devs :) and write blogs like you hahahahaa

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jordienr profile image
Jordi Enric

I always tell junior devs to write a blog so they solidify everything they learn. Teaching things and writing is a cheat-code for skyrocketing your career 😏

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mohamedmansor profile image
Mohamed Mansor

More and more of we don't do this here 😂

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gervg profile image
Gervin Guevarra

I'm mid-level but already balding. Guess I'm still on track 😂

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jordienr profile image
Jordi Enric

Your brain will not overheat!

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biffbaff64 profile image
Richard Ikin

Yes, I can identify with a lot of these. I eventually came to hate being a team leader/senior dev because of the meetings, documentation, forms, lack of coding.

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jordienr profile image
Jordi Enric

I love documenting so sometimes I will ask for the tasks that require documenting and get to skip some meetings 😎

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jordienr profile image
Jordi Enric

My bad then because I didn’t mean to make it sound like that. Just wanted to list some funny things 😅

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manvillej profile image
Jeff Manville

another: Your boss jokingly asks for a feature that would be nightmarish and you have mild anxiety for an hour

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guilhermestella profile image
Guilherme Augusto Stella • Edited

maybe you can keep your hair like Gilfoyle
dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/up...

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jordienr profile image
Jordi Enric

You can you’ll just have worse cooling than someone without hair.