Hacker News Reader

Comment by rifung | Hacker News Reader

"when asked what makes you a senior developer, they answer 'Because I have been coding for 5 years'."

Maybe 5 years is insufficient, to be considered senior, but isn't the amount of time you've been coding what defines how senior you are? I get that technologies come and go and you have to stay up to date, but I would think that if someone were looking for a senior developer they would be looking for someone with a lot of experience, not necessarily someone who knows the ins and outs of technology X.

Can anyone shed some light on this? It just seems bizarre to me that if you want to be a senior developer you'd need to either stick with the same technologies you used before..

View on HN

Yeah I don't think I'd want to work for this guy. Keeping up is one thing. What makes a mature dev is language/tech agnostic.

I don't use any of the languages I used in college or uni. Does mean that I wasted loads of time and money?

No, the theory is much more valuable. Plus, it doesn't fall out of fashion the way frameworks do.

i have 12 years experience and my interviews have gone to complete train wrecks in the past - i cringe to think the interviewer might have had the same point of view as this guy, that I had just watched some videos and knew things at a high level. What a flat out ignorant view point.

This is often the case, the interviewers are completely clueless on selecting the right person for the job. Wasn't it on the news recently how a random selection did just as well?

To me, the 'Senior' adjective in a job title corresponds to the individual's position within the organization that has bestowed that title, not necessarily to the individual's abilities compared to the larger community.

I agree. Based on the titles I've seen in my recent job searches, they're incredibly inconsistent between companies anyway.

Sometimes you need someone who knows every detail of whatever system. It can really pay off and you are willing to throw money and titles to get someone good. It doesn't mean they are a great senior dev, but if you need that person, then you need that person.

I've done embedded work, application work and now I'm doing web development. I often seen the "5 year senior wannabes". Hell, after 5 years of work, I was one of them! I refer to my old self as a "hotshot ass hole programmer". They are common.

These days, I think a junior developer is someone who needs assistance to get their job done. An intermediate developer is one who can get everything done without assistance (although they may still benefit from assistance!). A senior developer is someone who can bring up everybody else's level -- getting assistance in this seems to be a critical prerequisite for success).

I tell this to people on my team, but again it is hard to judge your own effectiveness. There is a lot of hubris. I know -- been there, done that, slept in the t-shirt for over 20 years. Thinking about it, I think the key piece of experience that can help you be a good senior developer is to watch a system that you built collapse under its own weight. Coming to grips with the idea that all of those things you really believed would definitely lead to wonderful software were just... wrong (and it doesn't matter what it was that you believed here).

> I think the key piece of experience that can help you be a good senior developer is to watch a system that you built collapse under its own weight.

Yeah, I like to assume this is the weakness of job-hopping/stack-changing candidates (as opposed to my not-so-glamorous self.)

Everything you build will fail and need replacement somehow, but you can't improve if you're always gone before it happens.

It echoes the same criticism we (tech-folks) often level at short-sighted Dilbertian managers.

Yeah, not the case at all.

Seniority means, to us at least, experience (i.e. beyond "don't know what you don't know" and at the "know I know some stuff but there's a lot I don't know" stage) and the ability to rapidly pick up and grok new tech, languages, ways of working, and what have you.

It's not about a certain level of experience in Node.js, or whether you have used the shiny new tech that came out last Thursday - it's about whether you can.

5 years! A career these days is 40-45 years. If you are "senior" in only 5 then where do you expect to go from there?

20 years experience, on a wide range of technologies, in a variety of roles, then we'll talk senior. Until then calling yourself "senior" just invites people not to take you seriously.

Where I am, you have to call yourself senior to get a salary comparable to other professions.

Exactly what I've seen have and experienced first-hand (as verified in recent salary negotiations). It's a systemic software industry issue, a peacock game we're expected to play in order to get ahead.

If you are "senior" in only 5 then where do you expect to go from there?

Our industry has a significant salary cap, since 27 year olds hold "senior positions", the 47 year olds aren't going to be making much more than them.

20 years in this industry invites people to treat you as a fossil and not even hire. Technology moves too fast, nobody cares what you did in 1995 anywhere near as much as what you did in 2013.

I'm a somewhat older programmer, and fwiw, I've met as many genuinely unhireable fossils as I've heard this complaint.

I've heard it from people who've been programming for 30+ years, whose idea of code versioning is the 'Save As' button. I've heard it from people whose entry to technology development was coding websites in HTML 1.0, who've learned very little else since.

Many people, at least from the previous generations of programmers, either don't appreciate or aren't able to manage the lifelong learning required by this profession.

As I said on another thread, 2010's MongoDB is just 1970's MUMPS. Once you have been through a few cycles, you see that actually technology comes round and round again. Centralize, distribute, centralize again, just one repeating pattern. Thick clients, thin clients, thick again. Compile, interpret, compile again. Just the buzzwords and the syntax changes.

All that is probably true, but what we are discussing here is perceived value to an employer. Its rather obvious in software that perceived value does not accrue with experience as it does in fields like law or medicine. Even though data shows doctors get worse over time, a 25 year veteran is held in much higher regard than a 5 year practicioner. In software circles, you are far more likely to be looked at as old and out of date, regardless of the skills you have amassed.

Oh, sure, trends in the libraries come and go, but if you don't think they're only going in circles, you should consider whether you'd rather be programming: a Ruby on Rails web app, or a COBOL-backed green screen application on an IBM AS/400.

Myself, I'll take those 45 years of progress, thank you kindly :)

Do you think there is a difference, other than you have a bigger screen to do it on now?

> If you are "senior" in only 5 then where do you expect to go from there?

Depends. After 5 years of being a senior developer, you might begin to think about being a junior architect or tech lead of some sort.

Now, I think I was a pretty senior developer after 5 years, but then I also had preprofessional experience going back another 5 years, and a few years of hobby experience before that... :P

For me, John Allspaw's article On Being A Senior Engineer[1] lays it all out pretty well. It addresses the issues we all seem to have with this article better than I could.

Generation X (and even more so generation Y) are cultures of immediate gratification. I’ve worked with a staggering number of engineers that expect the “career path” to take them to the highest ranks of the engineering group inside 5 years just because they are smart. This is simply impossible in the staggering numbers I’ve witnessed. Not everyone can be senior. If, after five years, you are senior, are you at the peak of your game? After five more years will you not have accrued more invaluable experience? What then? “Super engineer”? Five more years? “Super-duper engineer.” I blame the youth of our discipline for this affliction.

http://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a-senior-engi...

Web development is like an entry point for programming these days, the lowest hanging fruit if you will. I would not exactly call anyone who does exclusively web development "senior". It's like being a nurse - I suppose you can become a senior nurse, but you're not going to be a doctor. There's only so much you can progress professionally in web development, and each new stack gets easier to pick up, almost no challenge, patterns repeat and boredom sets in. I started from website development, then went to enterprise web application development and now moving on to data engineering (data mining, machine learning).

"Web development is like an entry point for programming these days"

Web development is just a _type_ of development. You're creating a hierarchy where none aught to exist.

I've known many system programmers who said the same thing about data engineering: "what kind of a lame made up job is that? They write Python and SQL queries, wow, that's barely programming."

It's all non-sense. You can employ techniques which vary over a wide range of sophistication to create web pages, embedded systems, or ETL pipelines. There is no clear cut hierarchy.

source: Have worked as a web dev, data warehouse engineer, and release engineer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com