The Conjoined Triangles of Senior-Level Development

>Why should we as software developers devalue our craft so much?

Frankly there's too much money being made at average skill levels that don't require any degree. I don't think there's an economic incentive to go for more regulation. Better yet, there's a ton of need and some of the work is just plain easy once you do have 1-2 years.

There's positions that don't directly affect life/liberty unlike law, medicine, engineering, and military. Making our industry like theirs would require legal regulation of titles and work.

Open source would then become a legal grey area (because OS stuff is used in software that affects life/liberty right now) unless you are willing to police open source and make sure all contributors are qualified. Or hold the companies responsible for only using open source that only has qualified contributors. Either way, it's a pretty massive blow to the whole idea of open source.

If you want this to happen organically, then that's just going to take time on the scale of generations. Law, medicine, engineering, and military have all had a ton of time to develop this versus software engineering. Right now we're just cavemen protecting and healing our villages with shell scripts and compilers.

In my experience a senior developer is a lesser-title for a CTO. A senior developer is someone who knows the company's mission, knows the technology, and knows the team. From there they evaluate what the board/CEO/kid with a plan want and develop a strategy to get the not-senior developers to implement that plan.

Key characteristics: Not chasing every new and shiny framework/tech Singular focus on stated objectives/milestones/deliverables Understands "big picture" as well as the granular details, so that they can provide advice and leadership about implementation Acts as buffer between "techies" and management in every cycle of iteration

It's very likely that my bullets are worded poorly, but my overall point is that a senior developer is someone who has the experience to liaison between those with ideas and those with technical skills. In some environments the sr. dev is the person doing the tech work, in other environment they're leading a team, in any case they have the knowledge, skills and experience to produce results.

I have bookmarked John Allspaw's thorough writeup about this topic because I figure it's worth re-reading to internalize: http://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a-senior-engi...

He also makes reference to the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition which is worth keeping in mind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_model_of_skill_acquisit...

Thanks for sharing. Good article as well

> Fire them if they prove they can't do their job.

What kind of timescale would you consider reasonable for this?

Because the cost of changing jobs once you have a family means anything less than 3 months is pretty unethical. Unless you tell them up front, but that's just probation, which means good luck hiring anyone.