Comments on: Junior Vs Senior Developers?

By: Senior and Junior Developers | junal on the run

Senior and Junior Developers | junal on the run — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 15:18:24 +0000

[...] wrote another blog about senior developers on my old blog and yesterday, after reading this blog I felt like writing next one on similar topic. Does it mean I’m really frustrated about this [...]

By: j3h

j3h — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 20:02:23 +0000

The classification is pretty simple, junior developers don’t know what they don’t know, which explains some of the comments.

When evaluating senior v junior developers you have to consider the context. I would hazard a guess that if you are working on yet another, dead on arrival, social networking start up, the developers that claim to be senior are anything but.

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By: Paul Anthony

Paul Anthony — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 19:07:33 +0000

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.

By: Lerxst

Lerxst — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 12:39:01 +0000

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.

By: warren

warren — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 00:42:58 +0000

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.

By: blick black

blick black — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 21:19:43 +0000

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.

By: Jon

Jon — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 20:38:37 +0000

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.

By: fdsfds

fdsfds — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 20:16:44 +0000

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.

By: Davy Brion

Davy Brion — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 19:16:09 +0000

@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

By: steve

steve — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 19:13:22 +0000

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.