DEFINITION GUIDE

Every company with software developers have their definition of a senior developer. For some that is the age, length of the experience, but for others, it’s a combination of this.

A lot of junior/medior developers are wondering when you become a senior developer. But the question you should ask is, how do you recognize a senior developer?

In this post, I want to give you my view on this. It’s not for every person or organization the same. But you can use it to define your definition out of it.

Why?

I write this is because I’ve heard developers use the term “senior” without understanding what it is. After reading this post I hope everyone understand what a senior developer is.

What To Talk About

1. How Do You Recognize A Senior Developer?
2. You Can’t Be A Senior In Everything
3. A Senior Should Explain The Why
4. A Senior Could Be A Lead Developer

1. How Do You Recognize A Senior Developer?

To recognize a senior developer, we should know how we can spot him or her. We have to know what kind of skills and characteristics we are looking for.

My list would be this:

• Leadership by example
• Strong communication
• Experience in different techniques and environments
• More than 5 years of development work experience
• Lack of arrogance
• Helpful
• Strong skills in a combination of coaching, teaching, and explaining
• Patient

Those are the most important skills for a senior to have. (Maybe I forgot someting). Technical skills are equally important as communicational skills.

If a senior developer is not able to explain things from his expertise, he or she is not an expert in that. Or he or she isn’t a senior developer.

A developer with 10 years of experience is a senior developer. If you don’t like that term, don’t use it 😉.

2. You Can’t Be A Senior In Everything

If you doubt yourself to be a senior developer because you don’t know everything? Let me tell you, that is not possible!

A can’t be a senior developer in everything! You’re likely gonna be a senior developer in a few areas but not 100% of them.

I call myself a senior developer, I‘m confident in the biggest part of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I know there are areas in those languages that I haven’t touched or haven’t ever spent time with. It always depends on the kind of projects you have worked on.

A senior developer isn’t a wizard (some are 🧙‍♂️) by default. A senior developer is someone with a lot of experience in a few areas of its work. Most of the time it has to do with years of experience.

3. A Senior Should Explain The Why

A senior developer should be able to explain why he or she does things that way and not another way. This is important for the rest of the developers with less experience.

That a senior developer knows how to write code sounds logical. Telling and understanding the “why” is important. A senior developer can be wrong.

A development team is as good as it’s the weakest developer

You can’t be right in everything. In the end, a development team is as good as it’s the weakest developer. So explaining why is very important.

4. A Senior Could Be A Lead Developer

Somehow I’ve noticed a lot of times that developers in a team expect a senior developer to become a lead developer. But that’s not always the case.

Because some senior developers don’t have the aspiration to lead other developers in his or her team. Most senior developers love to share their knowledge, but leading a team is a different role.

As a leader of a development team, your not only writing code. A big part of your time will be spend different. For example in meetings, helping other developers and managing expectations from upper management.

If you are a senior developer who doesn’t want to lead. Don’t feel guilty about that! Developers with those goals will fill that spot.

Thanks

I hope that after reading down to here that it’s more clear what a senior developer does. And what you can expect from him, her, or yourself.

But keep in mind that everyone is different so not every senior developer is the same.

If you have questions about this post, please don’t be shy and post them in the comments. Stupid questions about this don’t exist.

Happy Coding 🚀

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