- Requirements gathering

- Customer interaction

- "Managing upwards" (dealing with PMs, product people, designers)

- Estimation and planning

- Becoming a team player (Most college students only do a few, short-term group projects. This does not adequately prepare graduates for tight-knit teams in a professional setting.)

Anyone with a little bit of coding background can learn rails in a few days. The hard-won assets are all "soft skills:" professionalism, teamwork, planning. As far as I know, there's no substitute for real industry experience. (It would be awful nice if there were!)

- Documenting what you do. If you hoard knowledge or hide it in e-mails or IRC logs you're not helping anybody. If you're guy who changes something that affects other developers but don't send a courtesy e-mail or present your charges (your action being proportionate to the change you're making) -- you're that guy.

- Teaching others your skills. Being a font of knowledge, wisdom and ideas is also important. If the product owner, PM or a junior dev can approach you and get a straight-laced answer tailored to the skill-level individual you're doing really well indeed.

- Every team and company do things differently. Being able to contrast how you're going to do something against what you have done before is another useful skill.

- Caring about the 'boring stuff': release management. configuration management. proper continuous integration. simplifying your build steps. cleaning up hairy code or removing redundant files and gunk from older projects.

This. This this this. I just took a senior-level gig as a devops/productivity engineer where pretty much my entire job is figuring this stuff out. It is not stuff that juniors often think about, but it can take up a ton of management and seniors' time to get right so they don't have to.

Sigh careful there. I just got the evil eye from my boss for doing just that.

Only care about this kind of maintenance and future-proofing if you work in a tech-savvy company. In other environments where the suits have no understanding of things like technical debt and the value of maintaining a high quality, they will see this as procrastination.

When I was reasonably new, but had a project or two behind me, I thought I knew everything that was worth knowing. Slowly, as projects, responsibility and, most importantly, failures, all grew in size, it dawned on me that there was _a lot_ one could know about development.

Today, I know vastly more than I did a few years ago, yet now I feel like I know very little, because I understand how much else there is still to learn.

Now that I've done some technical interviewing for my employer, I see the same thing in others. Some of the best people are those that are humble enough to say that they don't know everything.

And on the flip side I've interviewed someone who rated themself 9/10 with git. I asked for an explanation of the term rebase, and got "huh?" as a response. I also see it in some vendors I cooperate with, young business' with young developers who think they can solve everything simply because they lack experience with failure.

So in short, knowing something of ones own limitations is important. Relevant comic: http://old.onefte.com/2010/06/19/i-am-legend/

Senior developers know what to plan ahead of time, what to leave until later, what questions to ask, etc. It doesn't have much to do with the language itself as with the design of the system as a whole.

And I'm the type of guy that would be totally honest about my shortcomings but unfortunately it also seems like this thruthfulness is seen negatively by most employers (but just because I don't know right now doesn't mean I'm incapable of learning or don't have other skills that are similar and applicable to the new skill).

A good senior person is not afraid to solve something using a short shell script running from cron. A junior person might be insecure about using something so antique and come up with a Ruby or Node or what have you solution instead.

I agree that the soft skills are very important but if that's true it doesn't seem to be fully appreciated I. The startup arena and seems to rely more on particular skillets more.

For example I've applied to companies that use Rails and even though I know I can learn it within a short while I've always received a thanks but no thanks message even though my resume, and associated accomplishments short list, show how I've excelled at a wide variety of projects within my organization and been able to work well with a range of different personality types.

So I feel because I'm not a "Rails" guy it holds me back. The other thing possibly, could be I can't really quantify the other usual requirement I see..."building at web scale". Since my organization doesn't really deal with that sort of traffic volume.

Of course keeping on trying is always a good thing, but it's also a bit of a bummer to get the feeling that the skills and experience one has already acquired aren't really appreciated.

If anyone would like to chat further I'll go ahead and check this thread a little later from my machine to give a thorough reply!

Same with 'Web Scale'. There are SO MANY different ways to gain experience with maintaining high-volume sites. You can generate the load yourself, you can volunteer for your favorite non-profit, you can find a startup that is facing these problems and needs cheap labor.

A Sr. Engineer sees problems to solve, and finds creative solutions. Lack of experience in a specific realm is one of those problems.

It all sounds so vague, so it's best summed up as "experience" and "people-skills"

I switched to development about half a year ago. Before that, I worked in the industry 7 years as a game designer, producer and created a startup (even found some seed investment) which gruesomely failed.

So, I'm confident that I have the skills that you listed, but calling myself a senior?...

You don't actually post "+1" or any variation whatsoever. Just click the triangle.

Choice quote: "I expect a “senior” engineer to be a mature engineer."

He elaborates at length about what that means in the post.

One thing I'd like to add is that a senior engineer works to build a culture and team where anyone--especially themselves--is replaceable. If you document your high-level thinking, if you break projects into lots of small manageable chunks, and make sure that at least one or two other people know everything you know, you will find that progress is a lot faster and that lots of bottlenecks magically disappear.

And ironically, for working to make yourself replaceable, you will probably find that you are treated better.

If somebody is not replaceable (and hence a potential bottleneck), they are by definition a risk. Therefore, it is in everyone's best interest to replace them and the system that enabled them, in order to harden everything against bad luck.

The cowboy coder who wrote most of the MVP in PHP in a month, for example, should be replaced forthwith if she can't document her work and get the rest of the team up to speed--if for no other reason than that she is a liability as the team grows and more things depend on her not failing.

It's kind of a counter-intuitive way of looking at it, but it makes sense.

"Mature engineers are empathetic"

Which to me means that most engineers are not mature, and not senior. Considering how much poor behavior I've seen by so-called "Sr" engineers I am hardly surprised. In a world where people are infrequently called to answer for their anti-social behavior directly, of course it will continue.

Ultimately I blame the internets for that. Cant easily have empathy online, no emotional feedback loop.

Don't focus on getting the title. Instead, focus on what you can control, and the titles and career advancement will take care of themselves.

There's a well-known, well-written essay on the qualities that a Senior Engineer possesses: http://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a-senior-engi...

Technical maturity comes from working on and finishing large projects. As with anything else, you can work for years and have lots of "experience", but if you are not critically thinking and learning during the journey, you won't get anywhere. Learn the pros and cons of high-level, architectural decisions so that you can be prepared to make those decisions someday in the face of uncertainty.

Personal maturity means working effectively on your own and especially with others. Pay attention to the highly respected engineers in your organization, and observe how they work with others.

Good luck!

The qualifications for being a Junior developer are (1) familiarity with new frameworks (2) nimbleness with polyglot approaches (3) ability to code considerably more than sit in meetings (4) an approach towards getting things done, rather than spend time considering getting things done.

Not every developer has the chops to be a Junior developer, but if a Senior developer has the interest and is willing to work hard at it, they can make it.

The role of junior engineers is that they are teachable and can generate value while they are being taught; the role of senior engineers is that they are teachers while both generating value of their own. There is no rarity to junior developers, there's potential plus inexperience. And that's it.

The new crop of developers can push up a full stack app in 3 days, play with it, and iterate the whole process in the following day.

It's a whole new world.

Ultimately there is just a whole area of experience that you cannot short circuit. While we laud genius programmers who brought something to the world (eg: Bram Cohen of bittorrent fame), there is a lot of luck involved, and ultimately no one is an island, there is a lot of supporting work to make something truly successful and widely adopted.

Good luck in your job hunt, but my best advice is to have patience, be humble and realize that your experience is a starting point, and you have much to learn.

I've found most junior debs I've worked with over the years (and have memories of my own behavior) of being too cock sure of approaches, to keen on new techniques etc...

Over engineering is a major problem I see from younger people, often leading to fragility and bugs, blowing out support in 6-12 months. The other issue is using frameworks for everything, which I've found on questioning reveals fundamental lacks of knowledge about the domain they are experts with (being instead framework experts). Using massive library packages for access to one util class is very very common.

Sometimes I deliberately ask for nonessential 3rd party framework changes, or the utility class to return it slightly different just to make sure that juniors have to look into the framework and understand the domain they are working with. Quite entertaining at times, even if you have to throw out there code and rewrite for them :)

A Sr. Dev. role is the one that people go to when an issue is not resolved for a period, one example is a month long intermittent bug. They are Sr. because Jr. ask for this bug to be assigned to Sr.. Sometimes Sr. do the real training new people.(I'll show you how it should work, go to X to show you how it works).

And here is the effect: If Sr. dev. has the tile to go w/ role, has to train and fix strange bugs, they use their position to KISS. Sadly, in most orgs, Sr. dev. is a role, not a title, it's just as common that Jr. dev. has a higher org. rank.

A role test: so lets say you want to add another 3rd party library. Who'll fix the bugs? Now you know who the Sr's are.

These roles are not new, this is very old: "Fools ignore complexity; experts avoid it; geniuses remove it."

Granted, making out this rule in an actual workforce might be a challenge, because job titles are affected by a number of practical factors such as the lack of other options for retaining people. A business can become top-heavy with senior titles, but people will seldom be demoted to reflect disparities between their job descriptions and their work. A hot candidate will be hired into a senior level, to put them into a more favorable salary range.

A junior developer can effectively build a software solution to something, given some advice about the interfaces and algorithms to be used.

A senior developer just needs a high level description of the desired technical solution. They can be trusted to instrument, refactor, collaborate, rewrite, invent, and get the problem solved.

A lead developer can be given bigger problems and organize an entire team of developers to tackle it.

This line of reasoning still works if you keep going:

A product manager can be given a metric to improve or a customer to satisfy. No further direction is required. They can be relied upon to do research, come up with a plan, hire staff (technical and nontechnical) and organize it all.

All CEOs have the same problem to solve: "Grow the business."

A senior is expected to be able to handle anything that comes up during the course of a project (including when things are on fire), to be able to delegate, to be able to mentor juniors and quality-control their work.

Juniors are expected to be learning as they go (to a greater extent) and likely to make mistakes or need help now and then.

In particular, a senior will know when they have something wrong or it's not good enough. A junior is reliant on others to tell them what's expected in a given situation.

If you are a recent graduate you are, by definition, a junior. After a few years you might have the experience necessary to become a senior, if you have earned the trust of your peers, especially those in charge of that decision.

It seems to me that the majority of people here have defined "seniority" with professionalism and a large repository of social skills acquired over the years.

I guess independent from that issue, the reason why I originally asked the question is when it comes to job postings. When companies advertise positions marked as senior, do they then actually mean it in the above definition?

Call me naive and unexperienced, but I'm somewhat surprised by the heavy emphasis on experience over knowledge. Is someone with more domain-knowledge but less experience more junior than someone with little to zero domain-knowledge but more experience?

The best way to actually get a job is to go out and meet people. Meetups, user groups, conferences are all good. Talking to other developers directly generally gives you a more accurate picture of what it's like to work somewhere and what's actually required. As a bonus if they like you and pass on your resume you avoid getting HR filtered.

[1] Software design and maintenance are language/domain portable and are difficult to teach without direct/repeated exposure to examples, which comes over time. Unless the domain is about specialized knowledge (e.g. security) it's generally faster to teach someone the quirks of your business than it is to teach them how to design software and deal with them making mistakes.

It entirely depends on the company. Ones that talk about X years with tool Y are probably using a time-based definition that they hope will translate into "this person has to have enough experience to come onboard and not break everything...right?" (In my experience, this is rarely effective.)

> Is someone with more domain-knowledge but less experience more junior than someone with little to zero domain-knowledge but more experience?

I generally will trust the latter more for one big reason: they (usually) have a better grasp of their known unknowns. Every project is a backyard full of rakes to step on and while someone with more domain knowledge with regards to, say, the tech stack will definitely have valuable contributions, I personally trust more experienced folks to ask better questions and to be able to leverage the folks with domain knowledge in the formulation of a plan of action.

(This obviously is flexible. A "senior" who can't do this and a "junior" who can may very quickly swap positions in my estimation and in how I do things.)

Some of that comes through experience, but I've met people with time put in that can't get their head around more than their niche. (I'm talking general programming here, not deep specialization)

When I first started out, I was obsessed with only using the latest and greatest technologies, but I've come to realize over the course of my career that this is simply infeasible for many organizations.

After a year they should no longer be junior. They are just a plain old developer, if not then perhaps programming is not for them.

Senior developers are simple those people who have a say in planning the direction that the company will take with their software. Strategic thinking in relation to the business needs of the company.

Developers tend to have a very flat hierarchy so senior is just as likely a management position rather than a recognition of outstanding skills.

In our company at present we have no juniors as everyone has been there more than a year, but we also have no seniors. To be honest I think that senior developers only appear when the head count gets into double figures and management cannot hold meetings with everyone over every little thing. Hence senior as a management position / title.

"Dev 2": Mostly works independently, knows when to ask for help

Senior Dev: Provides more help / guidance

Experience. A very skilled young programmer with "raw engineering talent" won't automatically be described as a senior developer on that basis alone. Also, keep in mind, in a very ageist profession like programming, being called a senior developer can be taken as an insult.

What is the difference between a software developer and many other professions? A software developer is constantly learning new techniques, new languages, new technologies. Therefore a senior software developer knows a lot more than a junior one and has more hands on experience with more aspects of the trade.

Sometimes companies consider a 'junior' to be someone with "at least x years experience".

I've seen this situation play out at least 3-5 times now. I'm not exactly sure where someone who is a 'junior' is meant to get experience for a year (real work) and then apply for a 'junior' position that has shitty pay just so that you can add up more exp.

I've also seen a lot of intern positions saying "work for us, slog your guts out for 3 months with no pay, you will compete with at least 5 others and at the end we will use any valuable code/work you've done, not hire you all and give the guy with the most hours/productivity the job and the rest of you can fuck off".

This industry is fucked... For a skill like programming I'd expect even a junior with no exp. to earn at least $5-$10 dollars per hour.

Many places defines senior developers as having +5 years of professional experience (i.e. excluding college). But it varies a lot from company to company.

A brand new junior employee is responsible for very little--most of what they do is going to be reviewed by more experienced engineers.

A senior engineer might be able to be tech lead a small month long project, a principal engineer might be responsible for a large subsystem, an architect would be responsible for an entire product.

Finally a distinguished engineer (essentially a VP-level position, but on the tech side of things rather than the management side) would be responsible for the technical direction of the entire company and be a strong input to the overall design of brand new products.

Hmm. While I really like your definitions, I'm surprised that a senior engineer can only be considered responsible enough for a small, month long project.

I say this because I've only ever seen the first two titles ever.

New career goal: be a distinguished engineer. What company was your previous company?

However, contrary to some of my previous experiences, a senior is that person that has an answer to most of your questions (and the disposition to answer them). It's that person in the office that can pull a project or a team on his own on the long term, without major fuck-ups and with a clever solution for all unexpected problems.

And if you're interested in the more superficial description: human resources would call a senior someone who's been mastering his domain for at least 3 years.

The same person could be reasonably senior at one place, and reasonably junior at a different place.

Essentially the number of battle scars.

Sure, time helps, if you learn from your mistakes, both in engineering and life itself.

But I've seen 40 year old developers who I would consider juniors in every way that matters, and 20-somethings who I would trust to take the role of lead developer.

Also communication ability. Most coders cant.

A jr. engineer, not yet.

What this requires depends on the job, but it is a mix of technical virtuosity, social skills, and ability to navigate the corporate environment.

However, most "senior" developers were made by political fight.

an acceptable Junior Software Engineer... uses tools to make properly formatted code

produces readable code, mostly self-documenting

becomes a 'goto person' on code after spending 2 total weeks in it.

rarely goes 3 days without obvious progress or output to the sprint team

is comfortable making estimates about new work

is comfortable re-using existing patterns for new work, even in unfamiliar code

can explain the 'why' of processes and rules, and be able to see situations where they may not apply

understands agile development and participates effectively

----------------

a Senior Software Engineer... is also a Software Engineer with everything that comes with it

is a team representative of code, projects, and end-users

has a running list of 5 things the team or the team's code is weak in, and could be doing better

considers edge cases well, writes bulletproof code

understands integration points with other teams and projects

reliably resolves tickets in team's estimated timeframe.

does code reviews and design reviews that are kind and instructive

is able to refactor code to improve maintainability without being too aggressive and causing additional problems

is able to help any other dev with problems in any of the team's code

is capable of teaching a new employee about all of the team's code, projects, and end-users

brings innovative ideas back to the team from reading, experimentation, and conversations in addition to normal work

is a student of agile development and can effectively coach and mentor others in agile development

maintains good relationships among cross-functional team members

can boldly estimate very low or very high for new work, keen prediction for the very easy and very hard

can sense CPU, memory, and computation time problems in code invents new patterns and solutions rather than always using existing patterns

sees the give and take in processes and rules, uses them as a tool for guidance not to be followed rigidly 100% if not best for the company

understands feelings and history about codebases and projects, not just the immediately apparent facts

is not just extremely knowledgeable, but also with passion and proper application and improvisation of concepts

I've seen this one cause an actual, measurable financial loss:

//customer type X cannot purchase product type Y.

The code said another story, but someone trusted the comment. I only trust code.

10 years.

Someone else might care about pointer arithmetic, for example, I bet your clients don't, though.

Senior devs know a lot more about how to avoid causing problems in the code they write.