I'm not a senior developer
Today at work, I was forced to consider if I'm a senior developer. After some joking around with it, I came to the conclusion that I am not a senior developer but more of a mid-level developer on my way to seniorhood.
What's a senior developer? Plenty has been written about what it means to be a senior (developer) and what does a senior do. This post isn't about the book definition of one but more of an empiric glance at the "symptoms" of seniority, how companies see seniority, and what I believe I personally want to stride towards. It's also a semi-performance appraisal in disguise since the company I work at doesn't do appraisals at least not with a regular cadence.
Here are things I haven't yet done that I might consider senior-y aspects to focus on:
- Own a system or a large and isolated-enough subset of a system from start to production and maintain it long enough to see crucial flaws in your own design
- Concretely reduce risk in a software project
- Actively spread knowledge
- Mentor someone from junior/mid-level to senior
On a really high level, I've seen seniority being seen as something where you are able to pull your own weight with a system you are building and helping others out at the same time. Reality is of course a bit nuanced. Zach Tellman explains how senior engineers reduce risk. Drawing inspiration from parenting, I try to add my own leap-of-faith claim that seniority doesn't seem to be about becoming better at the expense of others but ensuring others get better while learning to get better for the benefit of others. The list is of course not perfect and will evolve over time.
Now, you can have seniority without having done any of the above things in the list, either because a company has different incentives for positions of seniority or maybe because a senior developer was promoted or hired for other reasons, or possibly because that developer is not competent enough. Potentially you work in a company whose baseline for seniority is lower than usual. But you also see consistently high performing seniors from particular shops and you feel you can trust their senior titles have impact.
I haven't really seen senior-title gamification being a thing in Finland, having concrete and explicit steps for attaining a senior salary level, title, and all that jazz. That said, I've been part of gamification on the lower salary levels and it always left me wondering what would it take for me to reach seniority in that company. The steps always felt implicit and hush-hushy.
Even if you achieve some level of seniority, it's hard to say if you really are a senior if your company does not employ explicit salary levels or hierarchical titles or any other explicit mechanisms to denote seniority within the company. In such cases, you could be left out to determine your maturity level on your own. In consultancies, you can also get a sense of your maturity based on the cases you're being sold to (and how you survive those cases).
In the end, it doesn't really matter if I get called a senior or not. However, I wouldn't be able to escape the imposter feeling of not feeling like a senior until I've done enough senior-y things. Just as with particular jobs where at first you don't fully qualify but grow into the position, senior titles have the potential to feel much like the same. I still like the egalitarian title programmer my company uses for all developers and will definitely keep using that externally.
Still, it's important to have aspirations of seniority and goals on how to reach that even if you subscribe to an egalitarian view of titling. Even though I'll continue to call myself a programmer, I will still keep thinking of goals on how I could become more than self-reliant and how I could start to help others, and eventually reach for those goals.