I’m a senior dev, having coded commercially for 20 years now, and I think you are correct.
In my time, I have been an embedded C developer, a kernel developer, MFC C++, then J2EE, then Mobile C# .NET, then Python we dev, Python DS, Python Scientific, DevOps, WebDev
These aren’t trivial projects, but entire systems, E.g. I solo built https://atomictessellator.com just to scratch my own itch learning quantum chemistry simulators.
I think you are 100% right, at about the 10-15 year mark learning new languages and tooling really is a matter of days, maybe a week if the tooling is very different. That’s 1 week from no experience in a language to “employable, productive member of a team”
At some point it all just clicks, I suspect the people above who are disagreeing and likely devs with maybe only 5-6 years experience who this hasn’t happened for yet.
Were you able to mentor juniors in best practices and see the foot guns that could happen based on your experience?
BTW, I’m using the definition of senior developer as defined by large tech companies - the whole “scope”, “impact”, “dealing with ambiguity”, “leading initiatives” metrics not “I code really well”.
My experience on the enterprise dev side (1996-2020 and going back on that side now), is that titles mean very little outside of tech companies with leveling guidelines.
BTW, the last time I had only six years of professional experience was 2002.
The last time I only had six years of programming experience was 1992. By then I had done assembly language programming as hobby on four architectures (65C02, 68K, PPC and x86)
In my time, I have been an embedded C developer, a kernel developer, MFC C++, then J2EE, then Mobile C# .NET, then Python we dev, Python DS, Python Scientific, DevOps, WebDev
These aren’t trivial projects, but entire systems, E.g. I solo built https://atomictessellator.com just to scratch my own itch learning quantum chemistry simulators.
I think you are 100% right, at about the 10-15 year mark learning new languages and tooling really is a matter of days, maybe a week if the tooling is very different. That’s 1 week from no experience in a language to “employable, productive member of a team”
At some point it all just clicks, I suspect the people above who are disagreeing and likely devs with maybe only 5-6 years experience who this hasn’t happened for yet.