5 ms·

I highly question the ability of companies to gauge the level of experience of any dev. The distinction between junior, mid, senior, lead is a facade. It is a

by mawadev 6mo ago

I highly question the ability of companies to gauge the level of experience of any dev. The distinction between junior, mid, senior, lead is a facade. It is a soft gradient that spans multiple areas, but is tainted and skewed by the technology du jour. Technically you don't have to be an employed developer to become a senior developer. It boils down to your personal willingness to learn and invest time building. What companies seek these days are people having the experience with (dysfunctional) organizational structure and working around the shortcomings of the organizations communication and funding patterns, nothing more. Does that really make you senior or just politically versed? The pattern shows up the most whenever failing software pokes holes in perception.

brabel 6mo ago
> Technically you don't have to be an employed developer to become a senior developer. That's incredibly unlikely. Do you need to be an employed surgeon to become a senior (or whatever they call it) surgeon?? I very much doubt you can be senior without having actually spent years doing it professionally. The experience is everything, no book will give you the sort of understanding you need. That's unfortunately human nature, we are not capable to learn and internalize things simply from reading or watching others do it, we absolutely need to do it ourselves to truly learn. Didactic books always have exercises for this reason. You can learn facts and techniques from books, obviously. But just because you've read a book about Michelin restaurants that you can now be a Michelin Chef.
- kaashif 6mo ago
  Maybe they mean you can be not employed and build products yourself? Technically true, but that's like running your own surgeries or something, you're still doing surgery.
- andrewstuart 6mo ago
  Analogies to other professions give your argument an air of legitimacy, with none. There’s plenty of people in this world who are expert programmers without following any traditional path. “Oh yeah, like who”, you say. Con Kolivas, anaesthetist, work on kernel schedulers including the Staircase Deadline (RSDL) scheduler which was a precursor to the Completely Fair Scheduler in Linux and the Brain Fuck Scheduler and the ck Patchset.
  - brabel 6mo ago
    I don’t say you cannot learn by yourself, my claim is you cannot learn without doing. Was that really unclear??
- lelanthran 6mo ago
  > That's unfortunately human nature, we are not capable to learn and internalize things simply from reading or watching others do it, we absolutely need to do it ourselves to truly learn. That is, and has always been, true. Currently, however, the narrative that is sold (and unfortunately accepted by so many of the senior developers who post here) is that the experience of telling someone else to do something is just as valuable.
  - BoingBoomTschak 6mo ago
    Yeah, but working in a team isn't something you can learn without doing.
- rglover 6mo ago
  I've never worked in a corporate environment beyond client projects. Picked up a book on XHTML (no, that isn't a typo) and CSS in 2007, just kept trying to build stuff I wanted to build and backfilling knowledge as I went. Not only is it possible, it's preferred. ~20 years in and I've learned how to build my own full-stack JS framework, deployment infra, a CSS framework, and an embedded database to boot. Not one drop of this would have been possible had I taken the traditional corporate track.
  - ivan_gammel 6mo ago
    All of this is possible on a corporate track. Ability to build frameworks and tools do qualify a person as at least a solid mid-level professional, not having corporate experience and associated skills can be a pretty big gap in their CV.
    - rglover 6mo ago
      Possibilities are not results.
      - ivan_gammel 6mo ago
        That’s quite obvious, ontologically speaking.
teaearlgraycold 6mo ago
> What companies seek these days are people having the experience with (dysfunctional) organizational structure and working around the shortcomings of the organizations communication and funding patterns, nothing more. This is depressing and seems right. And yet this is something I desperately want to be ignorant of. I don’t want to peel apart my brain for anyone. Working within these kinds of problems is pure pain.
gyomu 6mo ago
There are two kinds of developers. There's the kind that, when given a problem, will jump in, learn what they need to learn to solve the parts they don't fully understand yet, deliver meaningful iterative results, talk to people as needed, keep you posted on their progress, loop in other team members and offer/request help to/from them, take initiative on the obvious missing parts that would benefit the project as a whole, etc. And then there's the rest. Within the first few years of someone's career, you can quickly tell which kind they are. It's almost impossible to turn someone from the latter group into the former. Yes, everything else is a façade. You can be a "senior" developer with 30 years of experience and still be in the latter group. And you can be fresh out of college and be in the former. Now some people are extremely good at other skills (politics, interpersonal communication, bullshit, whatever you want to call it) and will be able to seem to be in the first group to the people who matter (managers, execs, etc) while actually being in the second group. But then we're not talking about actual software-making skills anymore. You can also totally be in the first group and be underpaid, never promoted, etc. There's little correlation with actually career success.
- hnthrow0287345 6mo ago
  >It's almost impossible to turn someone from the latter group into the former. Only if you're constrained by the same short-term thinking as US businesses. The way to do that is more of an apprenticeship model when someone observes/works closely with someone from the first group over years. Even then, the businesses don't want to pay for that, and why should the workers give that away for free? They want people to churn out code because they've chosen to hire micromanagers that need constant updates and babysitting through communication.
  - luckylion 6mo ago
    My experience is that that plainly does not work. I work with developers of both types, and the junior ones who are part of the first group are limited in their ability by experience, but they have an inquisitive mind and don't give up quickly when they encounter something they don't understand. Much more experienced developers of the second type just throw their hands up and give up (or now: turn to AI). I've worked closely with them to try and reform them. Maybe I'm doing it all wrong, but it has never succeeded. With the ones from the first group it can work that way: you can show them how you approach problems and they will ask questions and pick up patterns and you'll see them improve. > Even then, the businesses don't want to pay for that, and why should the workers give that away for free? Businesses would need a high likelihood that they can reap the rewards of upskilling employees. Why invest a lot of money and high-talent attention into someone who might quit? At the same time, I'll happily pay three times as much for a truly skilled senior developer. I think the employee's incentives are much more aligned: it will increase their market value, it's an investment into their wealth, not the business'.
ivan_gammel 6mo ago
> Technically you don't have to be an employed developer to become a senior developer. Outside of a sufficiently large organization „seniority“ of a developer doesn‘t make any practical sense. So, technically you can assign yourself any label, but that would be weird thing to do. A freelancer is measured by portfolio, a computer scientist in academia by publications, an OSS contributor by the volume and impact of contributions. In either case, it‘s proportional to the effort spent on learning and building. Anyway, regardless of employment status the measure of your professionalism is not defined by only something you can learn from the books. Experience matters a lot: it‘s nearly impossible to succeed in stakeholder management or presentation of your solutions by reading anything. You need practice and feedback. Senior engineers aren‘t those who excel in writing code: fresh CS graduates are supposed to know algorithms better. Senior engineers can contribute at full scale of SDLC themselves and support others. That is much easier to achieve in a professional environment rather than working on amateur projects.
therealdrag0 6mo ago
Sure, we live in a society. Seniority is about your ability to make an impact, which generally requires social and organizational skills. It can be bemoaned as much as you want but that’s how the world works.

by mawadev 6mo ago

brabel 6mo ago

> Technically you don't have to be an employed developer to become a senior developer. That's incredibly unlikely. Do you need to be an employed surgeon to become a senior (or whatever they call it) surgeon?? I very much doubt you can be senior without having actually spent years doing it professionally. The experience is everything, no book will give you the sort of understanding you need. That's unfortunately human nature, we are not capable to learn and internalize things simply from reading or watching others do it, we absolutely need to do it ourselves to truly learn. Didactic books always have exercises for this reason. You can learn facts and techniques from books, obviously. But just because you've read a book about Michelin restaurants that you can now be a Michelin Chef.

kaashif 6mo ago
Maybe they mean you can be not employed and build products yourself? Technically true, but that's like running your own surgeries or something, you're still doing surgery.
andrewstuart 6mo ago
Analogies to other professions give your argument an air of legitimacy, with none. There’s plenty of people in this world who are expert programmers without following any traditional path. “Oh yeah, like who”, you say. Con Kolivas, anaesthetist, work on kernel schedulers including the Staircase Deadline (RSDL) scheduler which was a precursor to the Completely Fair Scheduler in Linux and the Brain Fuck Scheduler and the ck Patchset.
- brabel 6mo ago
  I don’t say you cannot learn by yourself, my claim is you cannot learn without doing. Was that really unclear??
lelanthran 6mo ago
> That's unfortunately human nature, we are not capable to learn and internalize things simply from reading or watching others do it, we absolutely need to do it ourselves to truly learn. That is, and has always been, true. Currently, however, the narrative that is sold (and unfortunately accepted by so many of the senior developers who post here) is that the experience of telling someone else to do something is just as valuable.
- BoingBoomTschak 6mo ago
  Yeah, but working in a team isn't something you can learn without doing.
rglover 6mo ago
I've never worked in a corporate environment beyond client projects. Picked up a book on XHTML (no, that isn't a typo) and CSS in 2007, just kept trying to build stuff I wanted to build and backfilling knowledge as I went. Not only is it possible, it's preferred. ~20 years in and I've learned how to build my own full-stack JS framework, deployment infra, a CSS framework, and an embedded database to boot. Not one drop of this would have been possible had I taken the traditional corporate track.
- ivan_gammel 6mo ago
  All of this is possible on a corporate track. Ability to build frameworks and tools do qualify a person as at least a solid mid-level professional, not having corporate experience and associated skills can be a pretty big gap in their CV.
  - rglover 6mo ago
    Possibilities are not results.
    - ivan_gammel 6mo ago
      That’s quite obvious, ontologically speaking.

teaearlgraycold 6mo ago

> What companies seek these days are people having the experience with (dysfunctional) organizational structure and working around the shortcomings of the organizations communication and funding patterns, nothing more. This is depressing and seems right. And yet this is something I desperately want to be ignorant of. I don’t want to peel apart my brain for anyone. Working within these kinds of problems is pure pain.

gyomu 6mo ago

There are two kinds of developers. There's the kind that, when given a problem, will jump in, learn what they need to learn to solve the parts they don't fully understand yet, deliver meaningful iterative results, talk to people as needed, keep you posted on their progress, loop in other team members and offer/request help to/from them, take initiative on the obvious missing parts that would benefit the project as a whole, etc. And then there's the rest. Within the first few years of someone's career, you can quickly tell which kind they are. It's almost impossible to turn someone from the latter group into the former. Yes, everything else is a façade. You can be a "senior" developer with 30 years of experience and still be in the latter group. And you can be fresh out of college and be in the former. Now some people are extremely good at other skills (politics, interpersonal communication, bullshit, whatever you want to call it) and will be able to seem to be in the first group to the people who matter (managers, execs, etc) while actually being in the second group. But then we're not talking about actual software-making skills anymore. You can also totally be in the first group and be underpaid, never promoted, etc. There's little correlation with actually career success.

hnthrow0287345 6mo ago
>It's almost impossible to turn someone from the latter group into the former. Only if you're constrained by the same short-term thinking as US businesses. The way to do that is more of an apprenticeship model when someone observes/works closely with someone from the first group over years. Even then, the businesses don't want to pay for that, and why should the workers give that away for free? They want people to churn out code because they've chosen to hire micromanagers that need constant updates and babysitting through communication.
- luckylion 6mo ago
  My experience is that that plainly does not work. I work with developers of both types, and the junior ones who are part of the first group are limited in their ability by experience, but they have an inquisitive mind and don't give up quickly when they encounter something they don't understand. Much more experienced developers of the second type just throw their hands up and give up (or now: turn to AI). I've worked closely with them to try and reform them. Maybe I'm doing it all wrong, but it has never succeeded. With the ones from the first group it can work that way: you can show them how you approach problems and they will ask questions and pick up patterns and you'll see them improve. > Even then, the businesses don't want to pay for that, and why should the workers give that away for free? Businesses would need a high likelihood that they can reap the rewards of upskilling employees. Why invest a lot of money and high-talent attention into someone who might quit? At the same time, I'll happily pay three times as much for a truly skilled senior developer. I think the employee's incentives are much more aligned: it will increase their market value, it's an investment into their wealth, not the business'.

ivan_gammel 6mo ago

> Technically you don't have to be an employed developer to become a senior developer. Outside of a sufficiently large organization „seniority“ of a developer doesn‘t make any practical sense. So, technically you can assign yourself any label, but that would be weird thing to do. A freelancer is measured by portfolio, a computer scientist in academia by publications, an OSS contributor by the volume and impact of contributions. In either case, it‘s proportional to the effort spent on learning and building. Anyway, regardless of employment status the measure of your professionalism is not defined by only something you can learn from the books. Experience matters a lot: it‘s nearly impossible to succeed in stakeholder management or presentation of your solutions by reading anything. You need practice and feedback. Senior engineers aren‘t those who excel in writing code: fresh CS graduates are supposed to know algorithms better. Senior engineers can contribute at full scale of SDLC themselves and support others. That is much easier to achieve in a professional environment rather than working on amateur projects.

therealdrag0 6mo ago

Sure, we live in a society. Seniority is about your ability to make an impact, which generally requires social and organizational skills. It can be bemoaned as much as you want but that’s how the world works.