I was wondering when a developer has gone from junior to a regular developer. I imagine I'll be on the junior end for quite a while (totally fine with this btw, right now I'm more focused on learning than title) but titles are sort of thrown around in the startup world. I imagine there can be certain criteria/levels of competency that need to be hit that are more defined than "When you feel comfortable and are productive working alone".
If you want more context, I'm a junior rails developer and am largely self taught. I'm still rather new in the startup scene as well.
I'll give you an example: My friend hired two developers to build him an e-commerce site with inventory control in the backend. There are dozen of ways to approach this problem but the main thing to understand is, that he needs a solid working solution.
This was their first job, they decided to build it from scratch in Django, by reasoning that it has a great admin ui out of the box. Django maybe a good solution if he had an IT department or the e-commerce was his main business, but it isn't.
They should've offered him an off-the-shelf solution with minor modifications, a solution that is widely used and can be supported by a lot more developers.
Their main concern was to build some thing new from scratch which is tremendous amount of fun, and should be done when it is right, but it also means that you are getting your leg work on the client's expense, which can cost him to lose money.