Junior Vs Senior Developers?
Chris Brandsma recently wrote an insightful post about how we shouldn’t coddle junior developers. It’s a good post and i can definitely understand Chris’ frustrations on the matter. There’s just one thing i don’t understand though: why do we even differentiate between junior and senior developers?
First of all, what’s the difference between a senior developer and a junior developer? Is it merely the number of years of experience? In previous client engagements, i’ve seen more than my share of bad developers who’ve had years and years of experience. Would i trust those developers more simply because they have the experience required to be called ’seniors’? Hell no. Trust has to be earned, i don’t care if you just graduated or if you’ve been writing code for 5 years or more.
When i have to work with someone i’ve never worked before, i assess this person’s qualities and capabilities on two things: how he thinks about writing code (in general), and how easy he can pick up new concepts/practices/principles. That’s it. A junior developer with little to no experience can often be a lot more valuable than a developer who has 5 years of experience under his belt and just assumes that he knows it all.
With a senior developer, you have to be lucky that he’s learned from his previous mistakes (and every developer makes mistakes, no matter how good he is or how much experience he has), that he hasn’t picked up too many bad habits and that he is open minded. If you can get a senior developer like that, consider yourself very, very lucky because there really aren’t that many of them.
With a junior developer, you can easily mold them into the kind of developer you want them to be. They haven’t really had a lot of time to pick up bad habits, and they are eager to prove that they belong at your company so they will be very eager to learn and improve. All you need is a couple of people who are willing and capable of teaching these young developers.
Of course, with junior developers you do have to live with the fact that they will make rookie mistakes. You have to review their work a bit more, and make sure that they learn from their mistakes. If you do this from the beginning, you’ll quickly notice that the extra reviewing tasks will soon take up less and less work.
At my company, we don’t really differentiate between juniors and seniors. The last couple of years, we’ve pretty much only hired young developers who just graduated. And so far, it’s worked out great. They never get assigned easier tasks or anything like that, and they have to do the same kind of stuff that people with more experience need to do. The result is that we have a bunch of young developers (i think the average age of our developers is 24 or something) who already do a great job, and they’re constantly getting better.
How does this correlate to the ideas of apprenticeship | journey | master in software development?
never really thought about that… it’s more of a ‘you get in the deep end of the pool, but there’s a lifeguard on duty so don’t worry if anything goes wrong’ kinda thing.
I tend to think of myself as a “Junior” developer still, especially while learning new things, and I have been writing software for almost 5 years. Now that being said, I am comfortable helping and explaining things that I understand to other developers, and also happy to take the criticism and help from other devs when I don’t understand.
senior devs SHOULD not be based on experience, but more on vision, mentoring skills and leadership
For the most part Davy, I agree with what you’re saying AND I agree with what Chris is saying. It gets difficult since what matters most is talent; not experience or education. If I were hiring developers for a project, my job posting would include what I want them to know; not how long they’ve been doing “this” and what their degree is in “that”. If they can write good software and they understand the concepts that lead to good software, they’ll do a good job and they’re the fit for me. Just because somebody has “stuck around” for 10, 15 or 20 years doesn’t mean they have seniority over anybody else. It just means they’ve stuck to their profession for 10, 15 or 20 years. A TRUE senior developer (in my still growing book, as I don’t consider myself to be one…) is one who is willing to learn, research, mentor, train and discover alternative ways to develop and maintain software.
I feel that the openness to admit there is possibly another way to do it, in addition to being in a field where we’re continuously changing what works best, is a virtue that is often overlooked. This takes neither a Junior nor a Senior developer to recognize this. This leads to good software.
There is the situation where the person who has been coding for 5 years doesn’t have 5 years of experience. He has 1 year of experience 5 times. I meet a lot of these when I do interviews for my company. There are people who go to work and write code every day. Maybe they learn from their mistakes, maybe they don’t. Then there are people that actively study the craft and are working continuously at becoming better developers.
I could take someone right out of school that had the motivation and in one year’s time make them a better developer than some of these people I see with 5 years of experience. I know a guy who has been “programming” for 15 years…doesn’t know much. I am not even sure that Junior vs. Senior is the right argument. Maybe hacker vs. programmer is a better description.
Couple of points. This will of course vary by the culture within a given company (my own is in large, multi-billion $$ corps), so adjust as needed.
1) A person with merely 5 years of experience is still a junior, most likely. When we’re talking ’senior’ we’re usually talking about a decade or more of experience.
2) Senior-ship isn’t just bestowed based on a number of years. A senior must show to have a number of leadership qualities that make the bump in pay grade worth the money. These are:
a) The senior must be able to successfully coach/mentor junior developers.
b) The senior must be able to successfully deliver multiple large-scale projects simultaneously.
Note that knowledge of programming languages isn’t mentioned, nor is the ability to learn quickly (these are assumed to be a part of the developer toolset). To be a senior what matters is LEADERSHIP backed up by enough experience to make success the norm.
jr vs sr doesn’t have anything to do w/ amount of experience. it refers to amount of knowledge / wisdom. Years of experience is supposed to an indicator of how much knowledge / wisdom someone should have gained. However as other people have mentioned it’s not always an accurate indicator.
Now, there are a number of differences b/w jr and sr that come out during an interview if you ask the right questions. like scenarios when your live app has a hardware, or bottleneck problems, or your http server fails etc. the difference between a jr and sr person is apparent here. Environment is great separator; a sr guy should be able to answer all comers and assist anyone in the team w/ regards to setting up IDEs, app servers, db servers, load balancing, continuous integration servers, source control servers, etc.
I’m not trying to insult your company, but in my experience companies that hire young do so b/c cost is a priority. I’m a big believer in of the mantra “You get what you pay for”….and not just as it applies to our industry but in everything whether its buying a ford vs BMW, mc donald’s vs. filet mignon , hotel rooms etc. Consultancies / service providers are even worst — they will always hire cheap and charge as much as they can — that spread is their margin.
I would have to agree.
Personally I haven’t even graduated yet and whenever I have to work with code from any sort of “senior” developer it just gives me a headache because it’s usually so full of crap. Seriously, it’s like these people think that just because they’re paid well just any old crap they toss out is wonderful.
However let me just mention at this point that although by regular standards I can’t even be considered a junior developer, I do have more than 5 years of real world experience under my belt.
I totally agree with the author. I work on a team with 3 “junior” developers and 3 “senior” developers. The junior developers are at least 5 times as productive as the senior developers. The senior developers refuse to use an IDE, and are resistant to Hibernate or web frameworks, “I can write HTML and SQL by hand, why would I use a framework?”