
How can I advance in my current role? - payamb
I&#x27;ve been a PHP guy for about 3 years now and my current job title is mid level PHP developer.<p>I&#x27;ve been working on many different softwares in the past 2 years using Redis, ElasticSearch, All cool PHP frameworks ( Symfony, Laravel , ... ) , and on different platforms, AWS, GCloud .<p>But where should i head to become a senior ? I&#x27;m into back end stuff more than front end ( lets say HTML and JS ) . I like to advance, I don&#x27;t want a fancy job title , I want be a senior by skills, But i don&#x27;t know where to head to ?<p>Do u have any suggestion about new language&#x2F;framework&#x2F;tool set that should go after ?<p>Edit: Any idea about Go&#x2F;Node&#x2F;Scala&#x2F;Elixir ?
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techjuice
You will more then likely still be seen as a mid level developer for several
years by company HR groups until you add more of the enterprise senior level
skill sets to your resume experience. This will normally involve you
conducting the development of software in high traffic sites, dealing with
load balancing million+ visitor websites across several servers being served
behind a top tier CDN, handling large scale caching on the code and database
level, managing multiple terabytes or petabytes of storage, working with
integrating Akamai into sites along with their security features and API, etc.

You will normally also be an expert at certain database technology included
PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, MongoDB, and caching technology Memcached, Redis,
Zend Optimizer, OpCache, etc.

You will also need to be able to engineer solutions that scale appropriately
including hardware and software, train other developers and sometimes system
administrators, work with senior management, write tons of detailed
documentation, conduct security reviews, developer interviews, and more. Also
conducting performance optimizations at the high and low level is also
standard as you might have to write custom php extensions in C for
functionality you might need or want more of a speed boost out that is not
offered by default.

Once you get to this level most of your job will involve many questions from
other developers or senior managers about higher level engineering and
architectural work as you almost find yourself in a managerial type role. This
will normally involve more reading and writing development guidelines, helping
with writing policy, security documentation and guidelines.

Just remember, learning the programming language and a framework is only a
small part of becoming a senior developer. Only until you have the skill set
to do the upper tier work that is in high demand and low supply will you then
be in the senior developer / engineer group. It is not hard to make it there,
but it does take some time and experience. As getting the jobs that involve
more development and hard high end integration work are very competitive and
normally have some very high requirements for entry.

I recommend checking out the senior developer and engineering jobs at large
companies to get a better idea of what many companies are looking for and
start working towards those goals, especially if the companies are close to
you.

~~~
payamb
Thanks a lot for your detailed answer. I was looking exactly for this kinda of
advice :) I'll remember your golden words.

Management bits doesn't really interest me but knowing what are so called
enterprise skills are and where should i head to was really important to me.
Well answered.

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neduma
Go/Node/Scala/Elixir all are good choices - Go for scalable distributed multi
node deployment architectures.

There is nothing called _senior_ skills. As long as you cover a-z in given
project from css, caching to backups an monitoring. you're pro.

