How Do I Become a Senior Developer? What Is the Difference Between a Junior and Senior Developer?

At what point do you become a senior developer? What do I have to learn to become a senior developer? What is the path to senior developer? How do I know when I am a senior developer? In this video, I am going to answer your questions about becoming a senior developer.

[johnnydev]

As a software architect who leads a team, my definition is - *independence*. Senior dev is someone who can "own" a feature and navigate though problems to make it work end-to-end. Junior and mid-level need more or less tutoring and guidance. Seniors get the job done. Period.

Practice that one skill - getting the job done, independently. Be persistent, focused, relentless. That saves me time.

[brianm]

I've always found that senior developers not only have the experience, but are using that experience with the team to help architect new systems or add new functionality to existing systems. Giving your opinion on architecture and backing it up with sound reasoning (based on your experience), even if it's ultimately not what the team decides to go with, can help show that you're a leader that's ready for a senior position. I'm always pushing our junior developers to take charge and give architecture opinions, and not just leave it to the senior level developers.

[placideirandora]

Thank you for the description of a senior developer. It's now clear to me for what I have to do to become one!

[Eric-lqfr]

Thank you Tim, these videos are really addressing all the issues I am and have experienced throughout my developer career. Its great to know I am not alone and even an expert still experience these issues.

[hemantkul]

Hi Tim, I would appriciat if you make a video on "How to become an Architect from a Software Developer"?

[mazdaqshahzad]

It's amazing how questions in my mind are being answered every Thursday.

[valdecirsouza]

Great info! I am Learning C# and your advices are great! Many thanks from Brazil!

[DameLyf]

The 2-5 build application idea is SOLID, and definitely put you in the jr. developer mindset, for me, always learning and be hungry to try different things. great advice

[Minecrafterrrr]

Brilliant video :) You helped me a lot with your videos to get my first C# internship. And by making videos like this i will stay with you through my way to a senior Dev. Thanks a lot ☺️👊

[kalaiselvanra]

If only HR people see this and posts description relatively. They want senior developer with 2 years experience for price of dozen tacos.

[DasturlashniOrganamiz]

And as always many thanks to you! Today's content was very useful!

[hungerface]

Awesome video! You're so wise and humble!

[mhmrezaramezani]

Thank you for the description. It cleared me. Now I know my position and what's my approach.

[dempsbm]

Excellent, excellent video from Mr. Corey.

OK, some things on this topic that are pretty important. This business of a "senior developer" only comes along after a technology matures. In the 1990's when I started with the first beta version of active server pages, which is those days was an ISAPI extension in Visual C++ to IIS that a guy at MicroSoft built apparently for fun, there was no such thing as a "senior developer" in modern software. "Senior developers" in those days were mostly COBOL guys (and gals) on the mainframe. The only other "senior developers" worked for computer companies such as MicroSoft, Symantec, Borland or the big guys -- IBM, Unisys, and HP. JAVA was developed by SUN (a unix workstation maker -- it stood for Stanford University Networking) to automate videos on the web through something called Applets (no one has written these in years.) JavaScript was a new language invented by Netscape (which ceased to exist years ago.) But now that web technologies and mobile techhnologies have matured, this business of "senior developers" has become a hot topic again.

So what is a senior? A senior developer is someone who knows a given code base and is able to work independently without any help. Whether that person is a kid out of college or a thirty five year veteran doesn't make any real difference. Frankly, kids out of college have a big advantage. When I studied computer science in the 1980's no one discussed design patterns and object oriented programming had yet to be invented. Many kids out of college know more about this stuff than I do, as these are hot topics of computer science. The big thing here is that managers have a confidence level with seniors -- they trust them to get the job done.


I am a senior where I work, but I might be little more than a junior anywhere else. It is truly difficult for anyone to come into a place and function immediately as a senior, and that is why there are so many jobs for senior developers -- there are lots of ways for a senior to fail in the first few days. Every place of work has its own culture and its own way of getting things done. It just takes time to adapt, but very few managers want to wait -- they want someone who can come in and do the job and be productive from day one. In my experience, that is hard for anyone.

Right now design patterns are the hot item. A couple of years ago it was algorithms. The bar keeps getting higher and the reason for that is that there are not many jobs. Companies can afford to be picky about who they hire because the candidate pool is so large and the number of jobs are so small. In the old days, you could get a job if you could spell JAVA . . . So my advice is don't go into IT/Computer Science unless you love programming. Learn what you can and at least be patient with yourself. Realize that you cannot be great at every job out there because you cannot know everything.

[SelfReflective]

You remind me a lot of Louis CK's sober brother

[charlesschneiderp]

Great approach! I think another aspect is delivery. How much you deliver, what you deliver and the quality of what you deliver.

[rotacioskapa]

Social skills are also important, even if you have seen everything in c#, you still need to be able to convince people why they should listen to you, and to be able to prove your point

[Spinikar]

Great video Tim. I have now professionally 1 year development under my belt, but over 10 years of IT experience, and In my role I'm not considered a Junior. Not classed as a senior, I'm just a mid-level I guess you could say. I had a lot of experience for example with SQL before hand, so then learning to write code that uses SQL wasn't that hard. Knowing just the language I find isn't everything, but how you use it to accomplish a task is more important. And yeah, I have much to learn, but I know enough that a quick google search gets me past it.

[CyberAbyss]

Thanks Tim! Great video. I'm also on my 2nd decade of web / software development. I landed my current senior dev role at a start-up but they ended up needing an everything guy so I just became whatever they needed. They threw everything at me from Salesforce to Excel Macros then became their site reliability engineer for C# MVC customer portal being developed by offshore team. 4 years later, I'm now on multiple teams supporting C# MVC applications. Yes, your development experience may very. LOL

[kinsondigital]

I also think that a Senior Developer should encompass not just experience but also the drive, intent and implementation of continuous improvement in the practices, effeciency, listening and communication skills as well as collaboration with your team. Basically I think it is more then just how much code you have written, but also how you manage/deal with people.