What does being a senior mean to you? What aspects would you say are essential to become or be qualified as one? If you're in charged of recruiting, what do you look for?
You don't have to be one to answer. I'd like to hear from both sides, from people who have a senior role and new developers who are not.
Top comments (22)
Being a senior means being responsible for all the things that you experienced as a junior. As a junior, you have fully-fleshed-out tasks assigned to you. Being a senior means being responsible for doing the fleshing-out, and also being responsible for coaching your juniors as they complete those tasks. If you are asked to assist in interviews, it's your responsibility to evaluate the candidate objectively, both quantitatively and qualitatively. If they're hired, you have a responsibility to help on-board them--to be someone they can ask questions of, and help them start contributing to the team as quickly as possible.
Being a senior also means being responsible for your own development, as a professional, as a mentor/leader, and as a person. I find myself consistently disappointed by so-called senior developers that are possessed of great technical skill, yet also suffer from a dearth of leadership/mentorship ability. In my experience, these types of seniors contribute little more to the team than a reasonably-skilled junior. In some cases, they can even be actively antagonistic, and have a negative affect on the team, both internally and externally.
I think part of the reason the transition from junior to mid to senior happens so quickly in software development is because it is easy to get started on the process of becoming a "senior". However, and again, this is my experience, it's a longer road from senior, to principal, to staff, to fellow. And this ignores the route into a team leader or even management role.
Good answer, recently promoted senior. Finding it hard to deal with the ambiguity. I certainly lack some skills but trying to fill in the gaps.
I really like your answer, I feel it touches on all the important points!
I have experienced those kinds of seniors from time to time, not that fun to work with!
A senior engineer is independent. You can give them a task, and they will go talk to the right people, do research, figure out a good approach, and implement it. They get stuck very rarely. When working in areas of a codebase that they are unfamiliar with, they will speak to those who know more about it, but they don't have to. They have the skills to figure everything out on their own, if they must. To me, that's the main trait of a senior engineer.
A battle hardened developer who has been to war (worked on tons of projects) and back. Gaining lots of experience in the field is what separates a Senior from a Junior. Working on personal projects only gets you so far to reach that extra level you also need to know how to collaborate with different teams.
And go through an entire project lifecycle from conception to production level code and architecture.
A Senior is a developer who is experienced enough to handle all of the task by themselves without any help from someone else.
A Senior is someone reliable.
A Senior "babysits" mid/junior developers (whether that is included in their job description or not).
A Senior can easily be a team lead if needed.
A Senior understand how the company's business is being conducted.
A Senior deserves a bigger salary and recognition.
In most, if not all companies I've been in, it mostly just means being older. The job isn't much different, you're just better at it, and get paid more
Interesting, do you think it's a coincidence or do you feel like this might be the case in most companies?
Well, I've been doing this professionally for 26 years and am basing my assessment on that. I suspect it's the case in most companies
Cheers! Fair enough, I don't have as much experience so I can't know for sure!
When things break I have no one to call and everyone expects me to fix the issue.
Being senior to me means to transcend the purely technical challenges of development and go above and beyond them, both for yourself and your team.
Do you mind elaborating a bit? In what sense would you say you go above and beyond the technical challenges?
Above the technical challenges are the challenges to help other developers and teams develop themselves. Beyond them are the challenges of connecting with other parts of your company, eg sales, to learn more about the challenges the technical challenges are embedded in.
Cool, thanks for expanding. I could not agree more!
From the recruiting side, I feel that being senior is more towards the "problem finder"path. They are also way more independent, mentor other juniors, are great at tech interviewing, have a solid understanding of the business and are able to translate the tech language well to non tech people.
I think senior dev should have these qualities:
For me, the latter is more difficult. It is like being guardian to avoid headache on team members. Saying "no" to poorly defined features, explaining why small change in database takes couple of weeks. But it must be done.
For me, being a senior means being the person you needed when you were a junior.
I really like this answer!
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