I am CTO and 20+ years: Difference is just the role assigned, sometimes 10K hours of hands on, mostly not. Jr. dev is sometimes there just to fasttrack to mana

I am CTO and 20+ years: Difference is just the role assigned, sometimes 10K hours of hands on, mostly not. Jr. dev is sometimes there just to fasttrack to manager roles. A Sr. Dev. role is the one that people go to when an issue is not resolved for a period, one example is a month long intermittent bug. They are Sr. because Jr. ask for this bug to be assigned to Sr.. Sometimes Sr. do the real training new people.(I'll show you how it should work, go to X to show you how it works). And here is the effect: If Sr. dev. has the tile to go w/ role, has to train and fix strange bugs, they use their position to KISS. Sadly, in most orgs, Sr. dev. is a role, not a title, it's just as common that Jr. dev. has a higher org. rank. A role test: so lets say you want to add another 3rd party library. Who'll fix the bugs? Now you know who the Sr's are. These roles are not new, this is very old: "Fools ignore complexity; experts avoid it; geniuses remove it."