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.
Latest comments (22)
For me, being a senior means being the person you needed when you were a junior.
I really like this answer!
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.
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.
Do you feel being a team lead should be required? Or could a developer become a senior without that particular skill?
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.
When things break I have no one to call and everyone expects me to fix the issue.
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!
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.
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!
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