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Ask HN: When are you considered a “senior” programmer?

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Re: Ask HN: When are you considered a “senior” programmer?

#51

Post by mmirza984 »

rjbwork wrote: post #40
mmirza984 wrote: post #38

Well usually companies have their own view on seniority, and it could include how many years you have been there, but for what its worth for me a senior developer is a person who has experience with all stages of application development, which should imply that she/he can: - design and understand client/server architecture, - write code using best practices that is clean and maintainable, - knows database design and…

>- used UMLs Like unified modeling language?

Yes, UML diagrams. One should be able to read and understand them.

Re: Ask HN: When are you considered a “senior” programmer?

#53

Post by ghuntley »

Leadership and mentoring. When they can write great documentation (without prompting) and http://softwareleadweekly.com/ becomes their favourite weekly read. When they come to you with improvements outside of the technical domain on how to improve shop and even better when it's just a side chat about what they have already improved and what went well, what didn't and what they learned (self-awareness). When they stop treating promotions like mechanical checkboxes.

Re: Ask HN: When are you considered a “senior” programmer?

#54

Post by wvh »

TurboHaskal wrote: post #26

When you are valuable and ask for a raise but they cannot give the amount expected because it's already Q4 so they give you the senior title instead. It can happen even with two years of experience.

That's also my experience. "Senior" is little more than a random title in most companies I worked for. It can be someone in their early twenties who just happened to have worked for 2 years on one product, even if it's their first job. It's frustrating at first to join a new company as someone who is older and has many more years of experience, then you remind yourself it's just a random title and try not to get hung up over it. Like many symbols of status, it's a pretty empty shell.

If someone like Donald Knuth would be forced due to economic circumstances to join a trendy web start-up, he'd be a junior working under a twenty-something senior with little more than some Javascript and MongoDB knowledge. The whole thing's silly, really.

Re: Ask HN: When are you considered a “senior” programmer?

#55

Post by mping »

Depends if its senior with a specific technology (ex: senior rails programmer) or generally senior programmer.

I consider senior someone who: - knows how to mentor juniors - knows his way around tech, even if he never used a particular product - most important, can communicate effectively with stakeholders and devs.

The best "senior" is the one who nags everyone to get stuff moving forward. Doesnt mind getting his hands dirty and going by people's desks to make sure the team delivers.

You may need to brush up your marketing skills in order to promote yourself as senior. Don't get impressed by people that know stuff.

Re: Ask HN: When are you considered a “senior” programmer?

#56

Post by pjc50 »

voltagex_ wrote: post #30
Steeeve wrote: post #27

My personal definitions: Junior: Can do it with guidance and/or clear and non-transitional specs Developer: Takes the ball and runs with it. Can walk a customer through requirements gathering and make recommendations. Will help guide junior developers. Senior Developer: Can architect a system well. Can communicate equally well between executives, salespeople, management, and end users. Can and will mentor lower level…

> Can walk a customer through requirements gathering and make recommendations Well yeah, I can do that, but isn't that normally the business analyst's job?

Change it to "can walk the business analyst through requirements generation etc"

(Yes, I am currently frustrated with our product management)

Re: Ask HN: When are you considered a “senior” programmer?

#57

Post by SpendBig »

Being a senior developer is not just having a great skillset. You need to be able to manage your work in a way the business values it. You need to interact with all sorts of people in the company you work for and help other teammembers rwaching the same level as you.

Our senior developer is always thinking about the business value when estimates are made vs quality. He even does not do alot of softwae development, but is always asked to help out other developers, system engineers and even management to give advice.

To be able to do that in a professional way, your vision plus skillset makes you a senior imo. Not just the years of experience and amount of skills you have.

Re: Ask HN: When are you considered a “senior” programmer?

#58

Post by philbo »

This is kind of tangential, but a couple of jobs ago I decided to actively purge all job titles from my CV/resumé. Officially, I'm currently a senior and have been in the past, but there have also been jobs in between where there was no "Senior" prefix in the title.

My main problem with thinking about developer roles in this way is that there's obviously no standard for what constitutes seniority. It varies between and sometimes within organisations. Advertising it, glorifying it, striving to achieve it, all take the focus away from far more interesting things that you can say about yourself and aim for.

Are you working on interesting projects? Are you learning new stuff? Are you being challenged technically? Are the other people on your team good developers? Do you enjoy what you do?

Seniority as an end in itself seems like a hollow objective to me. And making a big deal about it in a recruitment context takes the focus away from more meaningful topics.

Re: Ask HN: When are you considered a “senior” programmer?

#59

Post by tinix »

Grangar wrote: post #33
navyad wrote: post #8

sometimes these title can be dangerous.

Why?

I don't know what parent was thinking of... but titles, to me, are dangerous because titles are not used the same between one organization and another, and expectations and assumptions as to the proficiency of individuals may not be met solely based on title alone. Titles can also be dangerous because people who are undeserving of them think they know everything... when in reality they don't know shit. Especially when someone is given a higher title in lieu of higher compensation, when the title may not even be deserved. I've seen "senior software engineers" that can't even write consistently styled code, full of off-by-one bugs, and other noob shit. And I've seen "junior developers" run circles around them. It's all subjective... Titles are bullshit, basically...

Re: Ask HN: When are you considered a “senior” programmer?

#60

Post by k__ »

In Germany this isn't a thing, but when applying for a few jobs in the UK most employers considered me senior after that interview. Still didn't get the jobs, because I failed their programming tests.

Since I started programming my work-behaviour changed from asking people all the time when I don't know what's happening to reading their code.

I think developers are considered senior if they can work on their own.

Like, if you get all the engineering practices of designing, implementing and maintenance done without much help.

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