
What Truly Makes a Senior Developer - dsego
https://medium.com/s/story/what-truly-makes-a-senior-developer-74b608847d7e
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onion2k
A really good senior developer understands their own biases, and doesn't make
lists of things they're good at to say what a good senior developer should be
like.

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dsego
Why not? What do you think is wrong with this list?

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onion2k
The problem is that it defines the qualities of a senior without defining what
a senior is except for 'someone with these qualities'. There's nothing wrong
on the list if you think the list is the right definition of a senior
developer. For example, if I say I'm a senior but I don't mentor juniors that
presumably means I'm not really a senior, or maybe I'm a bad senior. Likewise
if I choose not to do company politics. Or even if I choose not to prioritize
code quality. The author would presumably accuse me of not being a _real_
senior. It's kind of like the "no true Scotsman" fallacy but for developers.

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dsego
Looks like good diagnostic criteria to me. If you are only y out of x, maybe
you aren't a senior after all, or like you said, a bad senior, someone who's
spent 10 years not growing and acquiring necessary skills to support your team
and company. What would be the other definition then? Would you consider
someone who doesn't have any of the listed abilities a senior?

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onion2k
_Would you consider someone who doesn 't have any of the listed abilities a
senior?_

Take someone like Linus Torvalds - he's famous for not being particularly nice
to 'junior' developers who are new to the Linux ecosystem and don't follow the
rules, he's not really a "specialized generalist" because he's always deep in
the kernel and that's pretty much it, and he doesn't do politics to the point
where he announced he was taking stock of the way he's treated people and
trying to do better. Is he a senior developer? Of course he is. You don't get
much more senior.

It's easy to think of senior developers we've all worked with who don't meet
some or even _any_ of these criteria. Consequently, in my opinion, the
criteria are not right in a lot of people's circumstances. They may be right
in yours, but that's not very useful.

