My friends are programmers, too. But they never get to senior level programmers, even if they keep working in software engineering for more than 10 years, or 20 years.
The reason? They refused to learn unit testing.
They love manual testing, from function to the software.
God bless them.
They have their use, but they have many shortcomings.
Reading, writing, and testing your own code is entry level. That’s most basic of basics.
My favorite definition of senior was “someone who can jump into any system in the project, including parts they aren’t familiar with, to diagnose and fix any issue”. That’s a little unfair for extremely large projects, but it’s pretty close.
Alternatively, senior developers are given vague problems and it’s up them to design, implement, and own solutions. Staff/principle, and to less extent senior, devs are also responsibly for wisely identifying what problems even need to be solved.
I mean I CAN write tests, and I have on a some particular projects, but it was the exception, not the rule.
I'm not trying to ruffle any feathers--I'm not anti-testing or anything. I just never worked somewhere it was part of the culture. Just small shops getting stuff done.
Anyway I don't feel particularly knowledgeable about testing. I encountered a lot of situations (in web dev) where I didn't know how to mock responses and stuff like that, and couldn't get coverage in some spots.
But I debugged complex bugs in foreign systems a lot. I was the go-to guy at one shop for that. Full stack dev, and solo for most of them, so I got to design and implement my own solutions. Discover my own complexity, debug my own bugs. I think I've probably built, and at least temporarily maintained, at least 15-20 rails apps, and there's countless non-rails apps. Many of them are still up ~5-10 years later, just how I built them.
23 years coding, per the author of this piece, but only 5 years of getting paid for it. A generalist in the web world, but little experience outside of web.
Anyway, all that to say, I have no idea if I'm senior or not. I've never been called it. The metrics are not clear (or consistent) and I feel like maybe it's impostor syndrome to NOT call myself senior, but maybe I'm actually not. I don't know!
This also may be partially due to being self-taught. I have gaps in my knowledge that just reflect my own experience, rather than that of a curriculum.
I'll report back if I ever get more professional experience.
There’s no standard definition of “senior”. Hell, most companies internally don’t even have a clear definition!
At a lot of places you can reach “senior” in just 3 to 5 years. Suffice to say not all seniors are equivalent. And that’s fine. All titles are arbitrary and made up.
Our sales people were Senior Account Executives, because nobody would talk to sales people.
Title inflation is real.
My friend Diane's card read "Queen of the Universe" ;-)
Actually, that's what's mediocre means. Outstanding people are not typical.
They are not the most productive way to get end to end automated test coverage.
Besides that, sometimes code just doesn’t change (say a basic math library). Then you’re mostly testing your compiler, which is useful but an intentional approach would be better.
Unit tests do come in handy when building a maths library.l or similar. Not in terms of catching a regression, but to help build it in the first place. One of the few places where TDD might actually be helpful.
The big drawback is I have to check all these tests/demos manually (across browsers and devices) before releasing a new version of the library into the wild. Automating that process is on my list of Things To Do - if anyone has suggestions/insights into current tooling/testing suites that could help me then I'm very willing to listen and learn!
I did write something about test harnesses vs. unit tests, a couple of years ago: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/testing-harness-vs-u...
TL;DR, test like crazy, but test smart.
My testing code (often, not unit tests), is generally much bigger than the code under test, but I'm just an old fogey, and everyone knows that old dudes can't code. I’m pretty sure that my code is so bad, it needs all that testing.
I've learned that lots of folks have some "litmus test," that they like to apply to others, where, if not passed, they are "bad programmers." In my case, I've learned that I'm a really "bad programmer," because I fail everyone's litmus test. In fact, I make a point of it.
Hey, it's a big world, and there's lots of freedom to believe as we please.