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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

I wish this were always true.

There is also the scenario where the “senior developer” just outlasted everyone else. They started when the company was small, didn’t really know what they were doing then but because they have built relationships with the right people and no where all of the bodies were buried - because they buried many of them - have an outsized influence on the organization, whether they are good or not.

Then you have two things happen. All of the talented people leave and you have the Dead Sea effect and the “senior developer” is nothing more than an expert beginner.

http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...

https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th...

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Yes. The article is a bit tautological. It's not defining seniority in terms of time spent. He actually says this at the end. Instead he's defining a "senior developer" as someone who has a necessary mix of the qualities he talks about. It would be more accurate to say "These are the traits your manager will tell you to develop to get promoted."

Personally, my favorite book about old coders is Coders At Work (https://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Program...). It's a bunch of interviews with programmers who have created programming languages and lots of the fundamental software we all rely on. It showed me what the journey to being a great programmer can look like.

To me, senior is a corporate term. Great programmers build great things. Senior developers get promoted. I sometimes ask young programmers this: Do you care about the craft or the career? I think being a great programmer will make a person money. There aren't that many truly great programmers. But if they're impatient or they don't think they can be great, they can probably be senior.

Becoming senior is easy: Just help your boss accomplish their goals. Pay attention and develop skills that will help you do this no matter where you are and what you're working on. If you over-specialize in a specific organization or person's need, you become the expert beginner and you can't leave or you will struggle.

Some of the things that help a person be senior can also make them great. But the path to being great is a very different and personal one (at least that's the impression I got from Coders At Work. I make no claims for myself.) Jeff Dean is undoubtedly a great programmer and was also the most senior developer at Google for a long time. They made new levels just for him. So they can overlap. If someone is lucky and their job is great, the things that make them senior can also make them great. If their job sucks and management is terrible, they'll have to choose every day between doing something great or doing something to get promoted (being senior.)

My favorite article on the journey of a software engineer is this one: https://medium.com/@webseanhickey/the-evolution-of-a-softwar... . To me it's the story of someone who started off trying to be senior but then started to become great.

Do you care about the craft or the career?

I would say both. But the field is littered with idealistic developers who “care about their craft” while their employers care only about profit and then are surprised when years later they discover that they have been taken advantage of and underpaid.

I think the article isn't so much talking about job titles. So, talking about senior instead of "senior" ;-)

The article is likely the exception, where people do grow and become better at grasping the depth and essence of the problems their solving and the breadth too. I’ve never seen people grow like that outside of elite companies, and even at that it’s rare.

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