Being a Senior Developer is more than being a long serving developer

Like many people, I started my development career from another role. I taught myself coding and then built software to help the business and myself. It was well received, but I did not feel like a "real" developer yet.

This experience convinced me that software was what I wanted to do, so I looked for a junior developer role. This wasn't easy, most companies want people who can come in and start being productive right away, and there were many skills I lacked from not working in a "true" software development environment. Eventually, after much persistence, I was taken in as a junior developer for a large finance company.

When handing in my resignation to my non-dev-shop company, I was offered a pay rise to more than I would be getting in the new role at the finance company. I was also offered a new position, the position of "Senior" developer.

Now I had a choice. I could stay, and drive development projects, leading a team of newly hired junior developers. My career would leap to a role of seniority and if I was to move on I could say I had been a "senior" developer.

Or, I could move into a new company as a junior developer, where I would be mentored, and surrounded by more senior developers.

I chose to move.

I wanted to see how it was"really"done. How developers work together, how they feed off each other, how they learn. I wanted to learn. I could not do that if I was the most senior developer.

Staying was never an option. I'd be a fraud. The title of senior can be extremely subjective, given for many reasons. Tenure, age, comparative skill, or genuine skill.

Yet I see this often. Developers who have always been a senior developer don't get to see how it's "really" done, how skilled software departments work together. You can't always work out the best ways to do things by yourself. You need exposure to different practices, methodologies, cultures, personalities, and skill levels.

Moving to a junior role was the best thing I ever did for my career. It taught me to understand the development process from the ground up, filling in many skills gaps from being self taught. Some of these skills were technical, some were interpersonal, but the most important, were both.

Now I realise that the maintainability of our code is one of our most important skills as a developer. It's often said that we write code once and maintain it ten times. Most importantly, other people maintain it. If your code isn't maintainable, then bugs happen.

If your code is not maintainable, it can bring down companies.

Senior developers who have always been senior may not learn the importance of maintainability. They never have the pleasure of being told off by more senior developers for sloppy, non-reusable code. They didn't have the privilege of being humble and being shown how to write code that others can work with. Nobody complains to them about their code because they are always more senior. So they tend to get away with it, and often end up in charge of a hard-to-maintain monolith that nobody wants to work with.

Senior developers should recognise that without exposure to different working dynamics, or other developers who have worked in different environments, they may be missing out.

Management should compliment in-house, home-grown senior developers with senior developers who have experience where they were not the most senior. Well rounded senior developers with a broad range of experience, who are not afraid to speak up when code is not written with others in mind.

If I had stayed as a "senior" developer, I may never have learnt the value of writing code for others.  And I may not even have realised it.

Popular posts from this blog

Writing Good Acceptance Criteria

Image
As discussed in my last article , Writing good Acceptance Criteria gives the Agile team clarity and helps them work towards a common goal, saving time and effort while increasing quality. Now I'd like to dig into the details of how to write good Acceptance Criteria. Behaviour Driven vs Procedural Driven Mindsets Many of us may be used to writing/seeing procedural driven tests; step by step instructions with actions and expected results. Procedure-driven tests are often imperative and trace a path through the system that covers multiple behaviors. As a result, they may be unnecessarily long, which can delay failure investigation, increase maintenance costs, and create confusion. Acceptance criteria, and indeed Behaviour Driven tests, should instead be behaviour driven. This means they should be Declarative , specifying how a system should behave in a particular scenario. Procedural/Imperative: Given the user opens a web browser And the user navigate
Read more

Amazing Things You Can Do With Azure Storage Queues

Image
Load Balancing and Workload distribution Queues can be used to organise the distribution of a workload across multiple processors. A common technique is to post messages to a queue which are a key to a task which needs to be performed, and have multiple worker processes pick these tasks from the queue to perform in parallel. This can be combined with other storage mechanisms to perform complex tasks. Say you were trying to render an animation. The queue could be loaded with keys, which point to an entity in Table storage. This entity could contain the Url of an image stored in blob storage. A worker process would pick up the message from the queue, reference the entity from the table and download the image from blob storage. It could then perform compute intensive tasks on the image while other worker processes picked up other images. In this way, cloud storage can be used to augment worker roles and perform powerful parallel operations. Asynchronous Processing and Temporal
Read more

The 7 Layers of Creativity

Image
It is said that art imitates life. To be able to express oneself creatively is both powerful and fulfilling. True creativity resides within all of us, but because of the power of creativity those that aren’t ‘naturally gifted’ feel intimidated to even try. By breaking down the fundamental layers of creativity, we see that the process of creating art is not only simple, but can be applied to all activities of your life – whether you are organizing a file cabinet or painting a self portrait, these 7 steps will help you find art in all that you do in life. Imagine you’re painting a picture. You find a nice spot, on the beach. You find an appropriate angle, where you will have an interesting view of the sea, with the beach and a palm tree coming in on one side. In the distance, there is a city skyline. It’s a perfect scene. Now, many would assume that the creative process involves simply transferring this beautiful image onto a canvas, that this is what it takes to be crea
Read more