I would say it is about sphere of influence. Are you inward looking and focused on developing your own competencies? Junior. Are you mentoring people on your team? Intermediate. Are you providing direction for the company or the industry at large? Senior.
Ask HN: When are you considered a “senior” programmer?
71–80 of 162 posts
Re: Ask HN: When are you considered a “senior” programmer?
#72I think that people emphasize knowledge too much. I think knowledge is a by-product of making senior developer.
Senior developer is about wisdom as opposed to knowledge. Juniors may learn things quickly, but what distinguishes senior is that you can trust them to do the right thing which is not always technical problem.
I like to compare this to asking children a question that they don't know the answer to. Some children will feel they have to come up with some answer and some will say that they don't know.
Junior developers too frequently feel pressured to produce a result and they don't see how saying that they don't know something is making them closer to producing anything. Senior developers know from their experience that this is just as important to know when you don't know something as it is important to know things. They will not feel too bad about not knowing something because they know the alternative is even worse.
Re: Ask HN: When are you considered a “senior” programmer?
#73Whatever it takes to best satisfy your customer. That's it.
No, I'm not being snarky, so hear me out...
I've met and worked with many developers over the years and lots of them have become very good with technology and user domains, but still have struggled to "crack the digital ceiling". These are brilliant people who have achieved serious things, but are still not recognized by the big decision makers as "senior", whatever that means.
Then there are a select few who always get the big gigs, big money, and big reputations. Why? Because they best satisfy their customers. There are lots of non-technical skills that help them, but I think the biggest is their ability to separate the signal from the noise and zero in of the most important things to work on and to get them done. It's almost like they have "satisfiability radar". And this rarely requires any special technical or people skills. All they really have to learn is a good grasp of the technology, a deep understanding of the customer's domain and business, and the ability to get things done through others. And how did they develop them? By good old fashioned grunt work, whether digging into the bowels of the system or getting up off their butts and relentlessly going around finding out whatever they needed to know.
Once you've figured out the best thing(s) to work on to best satisfy your customers, got them onto the decision makers' radar, and found a way to get them done one way or the other, you are no longer a dev or even a senior dev. You're now a digital rainmaker, the most senior dev of all.
Re: Ask HN: When are you considered a “senior” programmer?
#74I really liked this comment by @stray [0] from a similar Ask HN from a few months ago. That thread was titled "Ask HN: What makes a Senior Dev". Mistakes, rewrites, late nights, firefights, and deadlines. Core dumps, memory leaks, hardware faults, and plain bad luck. Big O, data flow, always learning -- or out you go. Manager metrics, schedules hectic, methodology hegelian dialectic. Taking the heat, feature creep, o…
That's just beautiful!
Re: Ask HN: When are you considered a “senior” programmer?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Anecdotally, I feel like this is how my older peers see me. I've been working (professionally) in this industry since I was 16 years old, I got my first job as a junior after tinkering with computers since I was 8 years old. At the age of 23, I've found it very difficult to earn the respect of the people around me because of my age. I have the title of senior developer because I've had experience working on scalabili…
I've been afraid of this. I've been working at a company for over 2 years. I'm 17, started here right after I turned 15. I've worked on many high profile projects. I've experienced a lot of respect, even with my age, but I don't want that to fade away in years to come.
Re: Ask HN: When are you considered a “senior” programmer?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anecdotally, I feel like this is how my older peers see me. I've been working (professionally) in this industry since I was 16 years old, I got my first job as a junior after tinkering with computers since I was 8 years old. At the age of 23, I've found it very difficult to earn the respect of the people around me because of my age. I have the title of senior developer because I've had experience working on scalabili…
I've been afraid of this. I've been working at a company for over 2 years. I'm 17, started here right after I turned 15. I've worked on many high profile projects. I've experienced a lot of respect, even with my age, but I don't want that to fade away in years to come.
You're probably going to encounter a lot of imposter syndrome imposed on you by the people around you - ignore it, you're just following a different track to the rest of your peer.
Re: Ask HN: When are you considered a “senior” programmer?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Senior people have made the right mistakes This really sums it up, almost every other answer could be seen as a consequence of this.
Do you have to make the right mistakes yourself ?
It helps with getting the muscular memory in place.
You can learn from other people's mistakes, but the pain you feel yourself will make you never forget it.
Re: Ask HN: When are you considered a “senior” programmer?
#78A "senior" is a someone who provides about 10X in value and earns about 2X in salary :)
More seriously, except for very big and very hierarchical orgs where tenure is overly important, people will tend to give you the senior title when your work is indispensable. To be indispensable you don't need to know by heart this technology or the other - you need to identify what are the things that bring the most value and work hard at delivering them.
Re: Ask HN: When are you considered a “senior” programmer?
#79Depends on % of code you reuse.
Re: Ask HN: When are you considered a “senior” programmer?
#80When you learn Erlang.
Do you become a lead developer when you've mastered K?