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Comment by TillE | Hacker News Reader

I feel like it's only in the past few years people have been talking about "junior" vs "senior" except as literal job titles. It's a weird binary distinction when of course gaining experience is a gradient.

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It is of course a gradient, however, on that gradient there exists an important threshold: can this person, under their own direction, produce positive net value?

Juniors require your active guidance. Seniors require your availability.

I consider the size of relevant “horizons” - time, number of features, number of people. A junior should be able to have a positive impact working independently within very narrow horizons (a single function, 1 other person, 1 hour), and is showing growth as those horizons increase.

I'd assume at least a three-layer distinction for this - juniors require guidance, seniors can provide it, but there's a lot of middle grounds and many years of work where you're not junior (at least according to this criterua) anymore but not yet senior.

There is no such universally accepted definition of these terms.

The one you propose is useful and how the literature on expertise defines a journeyman but the word "senior" is highly ambiguous.

There's no universally accepted definition of any term so I'm not sure how that's relevant. That's how I describe my own perspective, others are free to differ. Language can be vague and useful.

When it comes to being ambiguously defined, "senior" is not just any old term. A senior can be someone who's two years out of school, or it can someone of retirement age (senior citizen), or anything in-between.

Given context, an otherwise ambiguous word can be useful. "Senior" needs a lot of context, though.

Especially since the research on expertise already has a useful and operationally defined scale! https://two-wrongs.com/stop-using-junior-and-senior.html

TIL a "journeyman" is a "journée-man"

(for thoughts on how to progress beyond "master", see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39494801 )

> TIL a "journeyman" is a "journée-man"

By that guy's "executing a day’s work" definition. Usually it's used in the same sense as medieval - early modern guild terminology: After having apprenticed with your first master you set out on a journey to learn further from other masters of the craft in other towns. (Hopefully to graduate to master yourself after a while. No intermediary "expert" step in those days.)

But maybe that's what you meant. Sarcasm is sometimes hard to detect online.

Because they are two different jobs usually. Juniors are more focused on code while senior trends towards planning, reviewing, and leading. In my experience a senior is just as likely to spec out some work and pass it on as do it themselves.

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