A question on your model then: How does the progression of people through those "states" work. Are they judged by the team? I've interacted with a couple of se

A question on your model then: How does the progression of people through those "states" work. Are they judged by the team? I've interacted with a couple of senior developers who - without a doubt - had considerably more experience in the industry, knew more about niche-specific technology etc. etc, but were worse in all the things you just listed for the freshmen than some of the people I studied with. Experience and insight might get you very far, but there are also people who really don't care to learn new approaches on a certain topics, and those might as well be unit testing, versioning or even the readability of code. I guess in bigger companies, this might balance itself out, but if your dev team consists of about five people, there's always the chance you're in for a surprise if you're the new hire.