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.
First let me state that I largely agree with you. Remove the “Senior” *title*. It is a waste of time (and money).
Next, let me state that I believe you make your case with a massive lack of self awareness. You are SPEAKING FROM THE POSITION OF A PROPER SENIOR DEVELOPER. Phrases like:
“…you can easily mold them into the kind of developer you want them to be.”
and
“You have to review their work a bit more, and make sure that they learn from their mistakes.”
Maybe what you are really saying is that the use of the Senior title is a joke. That is surely what I believe. “Real” Senior Developers make themselves; they are not made by titles… and yes, they DO require experience to move beyond just coding into molding and guiding, using leverage of other developers to take the project to the next level.
Plainly, you speak as a “Senior Developer” that sees sooo many others with the title that should not have it.
I’ve actually had experiences that are very similar to the authors experiences. When I first entered my development career, I was given tasks that were very similar to the tasks that the more senior level developers were assigned to. This brought me up to speed incredibly fast (I remember thinking back after a year or so and saying that I couldn’t remember even a single day where I hadn’t learned something new).
When it was time for me to move on, I was surprised at the level of treatment that junior level developers received at my new company. They were given nothing but hideous maintenance tasks that none of the senior developers wanted to take part in (mostly because they were screwed up by senior-level development staff that advanced to these roles only because of time in the field). As a result, most of those junior level developers learned painful habits that were difficult to shake.
I somewhat agree. However I have to wonder if the author himself considers himself a senior. Perhaps one of those guys that already knows it all and doesn’t want to hear anything different from his peers.
@Steve
i consider myself to be a software developer who continuously wants to improve, and who wants to work with people who also want to keep improving…. nothing more, nothing less
Once your devs are getting near 30, get rid of them they get lazy/full of themselves and turn into cunts.
Stick with talented 19-27 year olds for maximum creativity and speed.
I agree with Shaun regarding his comment that a Senior developer will have the leadership qualities for mentoring others and managing multiple projects at a time. The Senior developer I work with demonstrates leadership and communication skills much better than myself and is able to successfully lead multiple projects in our organization. He demonstrates both system analyst and software developer skills and is considered a role model for most technical and analytical skills. In a traditional waterfall-like project, a good Senior developer is needed by the Project Manager, the Stakeholders and the other developers to provide the leadership skills such as: communication, estimation, analysis, push-back of requirements, triaging issues such as performance testing and go-live issues, etc etc. A good Senior developer involves other developers in all activities such as estimation and often delegates many of those tasks.
I would agree about senior developers. At the last place I worked at, both senior guys that I worked with had 10 years of experience. And they both used Hungarian notation and visual studio at the same time. And there was no way I could convince them how retarded it was to use the two together. Seniors with bad habits that refuse to change will do more damage to a project than a junior willing to change but learn from their mistakes.
Senior developer usually is Corporate code. The meaning varies. In companies I have worked in, Senior means variously:
1. seniority.
2. influence/power.
3. the one guy who wrote everything we now ship or wrote version 1.0 of something single-handedly.
Junior developer means, varioiusly:
1. useless, or less highly productive.
2. unproven/green.
3. less seniority.
There is a natural ferment where the “junior” guys who can outperform the senior guys rise to the top quickly in healthy organizations, and in unhealthy ones, the mere seniority/years-of-being-here things tends to count for more than the actual capacity to do the work.
I have had guys with ten years more experience working underneath me who were nevertheless nearly useless at their jobs. These were guys I myself hired. Guys who passed my flawed hiring/screening process with flying colours but who turned out incapable of really doing the work.
I have also had a few guys fresh out of school who are head and shoulders above their peers. In some organizations, I have identified “alpha” programmers, who are an order of magnitude better at their jobs than the others they work with. In one organization of about 12 developers, there were two, who did all the work, and the rest were basically grunts. Years of experience were nothing. Native cleverness, and a solid work ethic, made these guys alphas.
Senior may mean something, or it may not mean something. It means I get paid more than the guys who report to me, and in my case, I’m okay with that.
W
The problem with handing out titles like Senior is that on many cases those senior guys think that by Senior it means that they don’t have to open their work for review/criticism, that whatever they write or tell people to do is The Law.
My company does adopt such naming conventions, but I for one would abolish that; when introducing a new dev into the team I wouldn’t even tell him or her who are the seniors and who are not, let respect be earned and re-earned.
I’m somewhere between a junior dev and middleweight dev.
In my mind you do need to separate the terms, simply because this terming – puts you in a particular mindset. Juniors need a goal to reach, they need to be able to comfortably ask questions of more senior members of staff – if everyone appears equal who are they going to turn to?
When is someone going to take on someone’s advice when they don’t know how good that advice potentially is?
A healthy organisation in my mind is one which drops people’s titles at the door when performing code reviews. Everyone walks into a meeting without prejudice, to allow creative solutions. Decisions are based on find the best possible solutions, not who bangs the drums the loudest., or the one who slams his fist with a simple “…but I’m the senior developer I know best” attitude.
Arrogance is inversely proportional to ability in my book.