Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

What makes you a "senior" engineer, anyway? I feel confident calling myself fullstack. I'm not going to list all of the things I have done and know how to do because honestly it would feel arrogant. But what lead to the thought process that backend and frontend developers should be separate anyways? Yes, it is complicated and time consuming to keep up with both backend and frontend development, but there's no way you're telling me some people believe it's actually impossible to do that. If you dismiss the frontend as unimportant, what the hell are you writing the backend for to begin with???

I like coding and I definitely find programming enjoyable. But, importantly, I don't write software for the hell of it. If you actually give a damn about software development, I don't understand how you could simply dismiss one side of software development due to where it gets executed in the stack.

> What makes you a "senior" engineer?

You've spent enough time designing software that you can take a vague spec, design a solution avoiding common pitfalls and following a very easy path. Then you hand back a prototype followed by a complete and maintainable solution to a happy client.

At that point, your services should no longer be _required_ to keep the product working.

"But can you just change this?"

;)

Of course, it's software. We can change anything!

Even better, I'm not busy trying to keep your current software working - so I can get right on it.

Everyone has their own definitions. Here are mine. Do note that a lot of people who think that they are senior, actually aren't by mine, and senior is something that can be reached by some with very little experience.

Junior - Needs close supervision. Can't reliably develop something more than 1k lines.

Mid level - Has learned to follow a design consistently. Doesn't keep an eye on the bigger picture. Likely to fall apart around 10k lines.

Senior - Can work in the weeds and keep an eye on the business as a whole at the same time. In my experience is likely to be able to design something that can scale to 100+k lines.

As far as I can tell you can use the title if you've worked for about 8 years in the field. (Not that I really agree with the definition. But basically from what I see they do the same work as non-senior engineers but the job listings want more years of experiences.)

That's optimistic. I usually see it at about 4 years, which is absurd, and directly leads to the 26-year-old senior dev I worked under a couple of jobs ago, who's primary concern in code reviews was that I always cache my jQuery selectors "for performance reasons".

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