I aint stoppin nothin

I'm a senior developer and I'm constantly learning new things. I know most seniors do. Some might not, but so are some juniors who don't like to learn new things 😉 I also think that Impostor Syndrome (it's real, look it up) is a blocker for many juniors. The most important take away from this article is: never stay longer than two years at your first company. I've seen it many times. A "junior" jumps to another company and they stopped being seen as a junior, get a nice pay rise and they're feeling more confident.

According to the thumbnail, the only difference between a junior and a senior developer are glasses

Someone told me once "10 years of experience is not the same as 1 year of experience 10 times".

3:49 I think the real phenomenon the author is trying to articulate is that people new to a skill will cover a lot of ground learning the basics, while the senior is learning the finer points that take more time and experience to discover and understand. This learning curve creates a sort of "catch-up" effect, where a newbie may only take 2 years to cover half of the knowledge discrepancy of a 10 year senior employee.

At my work the role profiles are clearly defined, but the gist of it is when you're a junior you need help to complete most tasks, when you're an (intermediate) engineer you can complete most tasks on your own, when you're a senior you can complete your own tasks while also helping others with theirs. Anyone is free to pick up any task, and people are encouraged to go slightly out of their comfort zone. They might need help this time, but they will be able to do it independently next time. I also remind juniors that experience comes from learning from failures/mistakes, and more experienced engineers got that way by making mistakes and learning from them

Yea I left my Jr position once my Sr started to "You wrote it, you manage it", also at the same time saying "Just do what I told you to, don't step outside of the guidelines I drew", fun times

I'm having a much more upfront attitude since I started watching your videos, whenever someone asks if I can do something, even if I don't know how in the moment I'll gladly accept the task and work my ass off, just get the experience. If I have problems in the way, I'll ask for help, but at least I'm trying new things, and that's what makes me love software development right now. Well, that and learning Vim motions, I use neovim, btw...

Aside from the problem of determining exactly what counts as seniority, it's important to consider this distinction: There's a difference between the title "Senior Whatever" and the concept seniority. You can BS your way through a career and speedrun yourself to a title, but achieving seniority in practice cannot be cheated and will require you learn and experience the right things. Now, I know what you're thinking. Gatekeeping seniority? Nice. No, that's not my point. I just think titles are bullshit, and the sooner you forget about them and focus on improving yourself, the better. Sure, ask around what people consider seniority and use that as a guideline on what to improve on, but don't get too caught up on getting some title.

5:15 is where it's at for me. Wholesale agreement. Senior devs have started projects with naive assumptions, have dropped such projects and called it a learning experience, have struggled to maintain doomed and flawed projects, but also have started successful ones, experienced successful ones. Most importantly in all of this, they gathered this experience and express it in some way through idioms, prose, references, intuition, adapting(!) best practices. You don't just stop being junior after N years, or N projects. You transition to senior when the reality and consequences of your trade, tools, work have shaped you and express as general purpose competence.

I think Prime and Kent are talking about two different types of seniors in the intro tbh. Prime I think is talking about senior devs at places like Netflix or other tech forward companies. I started at a telecom company, and the Sr devs there were exactly like what Kent is talking about. I ran into this same mindset while interviewing at a few other places like Arris (a hardware company) and other older slower companies. That type honestly made me consider leaving the field altogether. Then I joined Meta and ran into the type of Sr devs Prime is talking about where we were constantly being challenged to try new things.

Experience doesn't stop seniors from wanting to learn new things but decades of burnout, loss of passion and golden handcuffs do. I've met plenty of seniors that are as curious and passionate as someone who is still falling in love with coding. But I've also met plenty that stopped wanting to evolve.

Just the beginning of the video encourages people to finally start doing shit in their life. When I was young, I've been making games, lot of games, never really finished any, but still had lot of ideas and passion to do them. Never gave up on idea. I think this is actually the best way how to become really good developer, by creating something in your free time and enjoy the fuck out of it.

I would say there is a line we should consider calling people senior and when we should not. Consider Alice, Bob, Clide and David. Alice went to work for Google for 3 years, and then she went onto working for Microsoft. Bob, graduating the same uni, took a different route, Bob went the startup route, spent the same amount of time at a small startup led by people who worked at Google and Microsoft. Clide, graduated the same uni, but went to a small, established company, that was not really trying to become the next Google, money was good, and Clide had more opportunity to work on his personal projects, travelling and so on. Clide was never truly challenged and got the senior position, because he stuck around for long enough. David, the same uni, went into a hedge fund as a quant dev. raking money with big bonuses. Brilliant guy, very smart, but never got to lead a team, delivering big projects, never really dug into the software architecture. They all have 5 years of experience. But they are all different, and they might be "senior" in their own field, e.g. Alice has a knowledge in the "web-scale" projects, Bob has a startup knowledge with amazing tutors behind him, Clide has a deep domain knowledge about the product (and its implementation) his company is selling and David has made the hedge fund tens of millions dollars, and knows how to make it rain. They are all senior enough in their own domain. Yet, they lack knowledge in one or more areas and they are not necessarily interchangeable. Some people don't get to become senior engineers for the things they have experienced and seen, but because they were long enough at some place. This inflates the ranks of "senior" engineering. Not everybody gets to work for the top companies, and work on the hardest problems (webscale, low latency, etc) and that's why I think sometimes we have to be careful when interviewing, whether the candidate is truly senior enough. What does the company expect from a "senior" engineer differs vastly.

Prime is not a genius. He learned and earned everything by hard work.

This is encouraging. I always thought that "Seniors" were based on years experience but this sheds light on the mentality that is truly different.

Great stuff. As engineering manager for over 5 years , I’ve had to train a lot of jrs how to become more sr quickly, as well as talking to srs about mentoring. I’ve realized it’s mostly about promoting exposure, challenging them with work outside their comfort zone, and pairing with Srs. The speed people do this is partly due to personality, but a lot is just showing people how to learn and gain experience faster. “apply what you learn” is great advice. I totally agree Experience is key, expertise is important but requires experience to apply it. Also, many problems aren’t solved by expertise but instead from experience. For example, how decide when and why need to roll a custom vs use a library ? How keep hard code maintainable ? .. expertise doesn’t solve these.

This mainly about how to look like a senior not to become one. There are three things that matter: coding skill, environment proficiency, and communication skill. You become senior when you can use those three to solve problems. Tip: code rarely solves problems, removing code more often solves problems. Using right tools, writing a good documentation, figuring out and implementing procedures etc solves 90% of problems.

dude totally resonated with this - i'd consider myself a junior developer from industry standard since just starting out. I feel there's still so much more to learn through experience that I'mma work on every day!

I am not a web-dev. I am an educator. But I watch these ThePrimeTime videos for motivation in my career. Definitely good content that transcends the web-dev community into my field. Thanks Primeagan. LEARN, LEARN, LEARN.

"Experienced developers are also likely to miss important new features in languages and tools because they're just used to doing things a certain way". I totally agree with this. This is normal human behaviour and this is to be expected. Once we establish "how things are", we become less flexable to what is possible. Which is why it is important to always challenge the facts that we know and our views on things. An exmaple in the software development could be, for instance, that every time we learn a new language, we are bringing our experience from the previouse one and try to do things the way we already familiar with. Such as moving from Java to Python, trying to minic irreleveant patterns, or trying to make OOP in Rust

Agreed, debugging is the best indicator to prove (to yourself) that you know your way around the language and the tools you're using. It also shows you what you're lacking which in turn makes you better at all things involved.

In my first job I went from a "webservices and content junior" to "webdevelopment specialist" within 1 year. I got 3 promotions "junior -> medior", "medior -> allround-ICT", and finally "allround-ICT -> webdevelopment specialist" in that year. (note that I said "in my first job" so that means I had no prior work experience at all). I think that the title "junior developer" is more applicable to measure how long you've been in the role in that specific company. It's usually the first few months when you change jobs that you will feel like a junior. Once you know (almost) everything about the software and infrastructure that your company uses you could consider yourself intermediate. And once you start contributing in big ways you can call yourself a senior.

"enteral junior situation", said by person who has been software engineer for a year and a half.

According to some HR, Senior Developer ~ Silver Rank , they wanna find some Challenger Dev with 50 years exps and can build time machine and quantum computer in a month

I am a mid level and companies often wanted me to become senior and coworkers are asking me why I am not a senior. I am also an introvert so senior means to have more meetings, more talking, more pair programming, more human interaction... I don't want all of that. I act sometimes like a senior, but I rather stay under the radar..

I've worked for one year now, and the first assignment I got (I work at a consulting company) was to join the team that took care of a 20 year old system that for the last like 5 years only been on life support. That was extremely useful because it has opened up my eyes for a bunch of problem that can emerge only years after deployment. Like production crashing because a the logging disk becomes full (it was never cleared in a decade, and no one notice because it never got full). And I've really observed how my senior colleagues work, and it's not about technology or anything like that, it's the mindset they have and what they see when they look at the same thing I look at. In meeting when we get assigned new project systems to setup, the types of questions they are immediately is the type I realise half way through coding it up. TLDR, seniors see a lot more pit falls and earlier

I would also advise sr not to act like jr. Doing repetitive works without thinking out of the box and automation, losing interests in learning, driven by hype instead of reason are just examples

21:10 It's also a practice in humility. Being able to drop preconceptions and just adapt to incoming information quickly. That is a skill that all software engineering teaches.

"brown bag lunch meeting" just sounds like forcing your coworkers to work through lunch...

I've been at my first dev job for coming up on 2 years. I'm on a tiny 3 person team, with only 1 position above me until the owner. Basically, there's no vertical movement. Because of this, I've focused almost all of my spare time on working on side projects, learning new technologies, and recently open source. I know I need a new job but it's much easier said than done. I've been applying for months now, and in the one interview I got, I built out a demo for them as an optimization for a product that they had. They loved it but decided I didn't have enough industry experience and gave me no further feedback upon inquiry. I've been applying to mostly intermediate and senior level positions, because those are where I feel I could experience the most growth, and I believe I could succeed in those positions. But I'm afraid that I may need to start applying to junior level positions instead, just to get noticed on the applications. Sorry for the rant, but advice would be appreciated.

In my experience, there are 2 kinds of Jr Devs: people who know how to code but are never going to really get it or get good, and those who are intelligent, creative, and passionate about the work. The former should not be hired; they are all too easy to weed out in a technical interview. The latter are basically Sr Devs the day they start programming; they just don't know it yet. The labels Jr and Sr are more about a company's need to "manage a career" by promotion. Most passionate developers do not want to do anything but. They do not want to become development managers, or move into marketing, or become a director/VP. Companies do not get this. They think if you love your current position enough to reject any notion of promotion, that there is something wrong with you, and that you should be fired for having a bad attitude about your "personal growth".

In a previous company, there was a senior developper who was 19. Some nerd kiddo who started coding at like 10 years old and basically when he finished high school he was already a senior programmer, he was offered a senior position out of high school, without ever being junior.

I've seen many (most?) developers never reach seniority nor expert level. They are just developers. And it's not necessarily about experience. Many (most?) people simply doesn't have the personality traits to be Senior.

I went from junior to senior at my company within 2 years. The advice in this article is basically exactly how i did it. Boiled down into a single sentence would be: To be moved up, move yourself up.

Seniors are people who embrace and experiment with new things so they know when/how they work and when to use them. They level up their team through their forward thinking knowledge, and are always sharing. Seniors deeply understand the business needs and what to prioritize tasks. Seniors also are good and open to mentoring new hires and juniors so that they can excel as engineers. Seniors also are great with cross collaboration. Seniors can come into any new company, and take a few weeks to a month to understand everything and become a force at the company. It's not about knowing one particular library or framework well, it's about how well you learn and implement

just started learning programming, it is a bit overwhelming but i guess the first checkpoint is to work my a.. of to get to be a sh.. junior. thanks Prime you gave me something to aspire to become.

Senior means, you can predict your project going to fail from the beginning or if you see code from others. Senior developers have learned to avoid these train wrecks by pretending they don't understand it.

1 year 7 months to become a senior dev. A lifetime to become a senior reader.

oof.. this senior description fits me so well after this.. on top of that I even fix and report random bugs I encounter in the wild west of GitHub.

I am at a company where the seniors are so bad that I had to steer the ship as a junior software developer. Don't consider that myself anymore.

Ah yes, speaking at conferences as someone with severe social anxiety sounds like fun!

Senior means: Your colleagues and bosses think you are a mad man when you see things no other one sees.

I couldn’t agree with the “seniority” definition more. I’ve been with my company for 5 years now and I consider myself senior because of three facets 1) general programming and infrastructure knowledge 2) business domain knowledge 3) system domain knowledge (how all of our subsystems communicate) If I entered another company, I’d drop steps 1 and 2 and just be a guy who knows how to program and understand other niches like docker and kubernetes…whilst those skills are valuable and allow you to build upon parts 2 and 3 quicker; I’d absolutely call myself a junior in a new business domain

Honestly... At my very first official work I already did most of the architecture work - why? Because I saw that people were annoyed by the technology needed (OSGi - and it was not a choice, because the company we integrate with needed it in their architecture that we do this way) or when someone put together project skeletons... or putting together some arcane maven stuff for a project where you feel people are exhausted from that even by seeing it. Guess what: People always like when you WORK. I also did overtime and did not care or whine, but was happy I close the gap in experience. In mid of the project I was pretty much architect on the whole bigger project, later I was training juniors and interns, later got my own team. One of the intern + later junior that I was training is also senior now there - so you can do this! What I could not really do: Become PM. I was having it as a goal and already had projects where I did huge part of that organizational roles, tender writing even, contracts, etc. Still I never got it officially and there I felt there is some "who will code if you go to management" kind of "you are too valuable as technical person" view so I feel it was more glass ceilingy for this...

Any advice on getting that junior role to begin with? The struggle is real.

A "senior" i work with got his title because he had 4 years of "coding" experience on his resume, BUT looking at the resume it was friggin medical coding for insurance! Can't program his way out of a paper bag! Titles mean nothing He's also a narcissist and the only way he hasn't been fired is because he used people. But everyone has caught on now and he's sinking quick.

“Sr Dev: someone who can take a Jr to Medior to Sr.” - an add-on to all the stuff that Prime already mentioned.

Prime this was a great video. Thanks for this!

I can't even get a junior job, despite designing own programming language and writing software in them. I even made a better HTML together with a rendering engine. But everyone says I need a psychiatric evaluation. I think I will write my own operating system instead.

So much depends on the person. There's a huge difference between a senior developer who entirely motivated collecting a paycheck and one who is curious about the code. What Kent is saying CAN be true of senior developers is 100% true of the senior developers who are primarily motivated by a paycheck. They won't try new things if they don't have to, because that's extra time and effort. The same can be true of junior devs who are just trying to skate by, however, most junior devs feel less secure in their jobs and are more eager to please. However, someone who is motivated by their curiosity for coding and a personal desire to learn, whether they are senior or junior, is going to experiment with new tech and new coding patterns.

that's so true, btw using Vim instantly made me Senior dev skipping Junior and Middle positions EZ

This is why it's best to take "any" job and get a year or two of experience and then jump to a conpany you really want to work for

being Senior is the same as being Wise. its your ability to recall your experiences and be able to avoid problems that have yet to happen.

Thiiiiis is the gooood content right here. thanks prime , needed this overview today. ++good review.

Prime screaming at me at 0:01 wakes me up much better than my coffee IV

"Perception is 9/10's of the law" yup

On the topic of new features one thing that sticks out in intermediate/junior devs is their eagerness to pull in 100 libraries to change the syntax to do some esoteric wrapping syntatic sugar nonsense because some guy on Twitter says it's the greatest thing over and it's going to change the world. Senior devs see through it and reject unnecessary crap in their bundle that unnecessarily complicates their DX for a simple syntatic sugar feature that you don't even use that often

Imagine writing an article teaching people how to hitting mega jackpot by spouting generics advices like just believe in yourself and buy tickets constantly. You're hitting senior role in a big corp after just a short time? Good on you then.

I've worked with people who have been working in Software engineering for 10 years that I would still concider junior. No title matters. Just judge people on what you encounter in their work.

Note that all these points basically carry to any job with a junior/mid/senior system. It's a bit clunky, sometimes it is used as an arbitrary way to categorize and lowball ppl on their pay or assignents, sometimes it's cleverly used to spread the work to the right people and for propper onboarding and training, ... But it all fluctuates and at the end of the day you can be in your first job and become as independent, fast, reliable and even able to teach others like a senior should in theory be able to.

Stop being a junior or I will take your job real quick buddy -Chat GPT

A Senior colleague of mine said that you cannot be a senior engineer until you crashed production at least once.

My trick: look for things that will come up soon and preemptively find a solution, pitch it and offer to implement that for the team or even the other teams. Suddenly you find yourself in a cross-team role, responsibly for an important coming matter. Software Supply Chain Security might be one of those topics currently.

Get in a team that respects you. If they don't trust you that's their problem. Some teams / CEOs / leaders / managers trust you from day one and praise your skills, and for some you're never good enough. It's possible to change someone's mind *sometimes* but not always. I don't think that seniors are afraid to learn new things. Some are, some are not. If i already found a great technique that works well for me, why change that. Not every trend is worth following. Sometimes they release new stuff and I'm the first on the hype train, because the new tool solves problems i've always had with the old one.

The push for this kind of mindset is how companys get a senior dev while paying a junior wage. Best thing you can do as a junior dev is apply for dev roles. Once you get a dev role apply for senior dev roles. Once you get a senior dev role apply for principal dev. Doing the job of a higher rank for free is NOT a good use of your time or energy.

I started learning GoLang and I started using NeoVim Left the JS/TS (but my job requires it so need to do that, trust me I can't escape it)

I quit my first startup company job after 1 year to get out of the junior perception, and they for no reason, gave me the title CTO on the letter of experience

This article sure did trigger a lot of people. You can tell because it seems readers completely forgot content of the disclaimer Steve wrote at the beginning.

After quite shitty day at work (2yr java dev) that made me doubt in my abilities, that's the video I needed.

I’m at a company with little flexibility to get to a senior title without many years of investment. Probably won’t stay too long, but I have learned a lot. It’s an embedded role, and my day to day involves reading data sheets for our SoC, debugging our boot loader (assembly mainly), writing and debugging low-level drivers (C), etc. I’m one of 3 devs on my small team, and I’m the one most responsible for low-level changes and fixes. I found a bug in our trap table this week, which needs to be ported upstream and may be present in already shipped products. I spent a week performance testing and debugging issues with our L2 cache controller, exchanging email with our chip supplier, and prompting them to send out an updated errata sheet. Im trying to get more comfortable taking initiative on problems that I find and advocating that they are worth some investment. Does that sound like a junior embedded engineer? Probably not, but it’s fine, I’ll have some great experience and should hopefully be able to jump up to a staff or senior position next time I change jobs.

why is it between junior and senior? isn't there middle level developer where most people are? =)

With what you're saying I feel like I was a SR before even starting learning

The Michael Jordan meme "stop it get some help" is pretty good

In order to be seen as senior within a little over a year, there were many weekends burnt and overtime hours I put in. Mostly because there aint no one who would give you space and time to create tools you feel your platform needs. I agree that you need to do that and also pick up tasks and even ask to help with projects with more advanced features just to gain experience working through problems. But most people aren't willing to put in that much extra time. That being said, I'm pretty confident I can get someone from junior to a solid mid in 3 months. Like, enough so that given the technical direction they are mostly independent and can produce most features. You don't have to be a senior, but you most definitely should stop being a junior.

Today, i learned the word "orthogonal."

I know a "junior" dev with 30 years of experience. He knows a lot but don't care about advancing his career so he got stuck doing junior work for life.

With that mustache he most definitely is a señor developer

I was coding for a decade and then had a year and half professional experience, and yet a hiring manager still told me i was “entry level” and come back when i had 3 years of professional experience MINIMUM. Well now i have 3 years and no one will even interview me 😮‍💨

As someone with 2 months of experience it makes me happy as im really doing all this stuff! I have rhis personal project called "bunget" that's a budgeting app I'm working on, and i use it to practice things i learn on it.

The move to Mexico is legit

i joined a company as junior dev and after about a year i got the senior title. i didn't even get a pay raise and when i asked for one, i didn't get an answer. i switched companies (to get a hefty raise) and still am a senior dev but honestly close to noone cares about your title. all they care about is what you have been able to build in the past

I know 11 programming langues, been a developer for 15 years, completed multi million dollar projects but I am sure as hell still a Junior.

0:36 Stop it, get some help. That meme is from an anti-drug campaign featuring Michael Jordan.

that's why people who get promoted usually have some relationship with their superior and that's how they are promoted.

You are right. There is no requirement time. But there is a flipside. Some people expect to become seniors simply because time has expired. It's like the flipside to the coin. If you can work really hard, then yeah, you could be a senior within two years. If you do the bare minimum, and ask to be made a senior because you've been a junior for two years... then no. That's not how it works.

In my career, I cared a lot about quick advancement and having senior-level status as quickly as possible. It took me around 4 years despite of I didn't have any tech degree. It was a difficult time and I was fighting for more than I was able to deliver. There were even some job losses connected with this attitude. I was caring for the growth of income so, I knew what I was going into. 😁😁

I'm a senior. Developing for over 20 years (last 15 in C# and SQL). I've used tons of languages over the years but that is my niche. In my current company my boss asked if I knew Python. I said I know about it. He asked if I'd try to fix a problem with a script than ran on the server overnight every night. I'd never seen Python code in my life I mainly was in the C type languages. Syntax confused me a little but fixed it in about 2 hours. Could have redone that as a console app in C# in about 10 minutes. Python on my hatred list made it right there beside PHP 😁

11:53 I completely agree with removing the position of architect since it leads to so many bad outcomes like lack of ownership, good theoretically but bad in practice designs and you can’t be an expert on every system.

"Senior", "Junior", bah, stuff and nonsense. Back in the day my job title was "Senior Software Engineer". That after only working for two years and half that time I was involved in electronics more than the assembly language we used at the time. "Junior" = younger, "Senior" = older. These terms do no relate to how much of a software wiz you are in any particular field or in general. There is no way what you call a "senior" developer of web apps or such is going to be a senior developer of things like ship simulation or jet engine management systems. It's not all about code, languages, libraries, debugging. There is a huge amount of problem domain knowledge and experience to take into account.

Summary: Start wearing glasses

I'm not even an intern yet but this article made me set my sights higher

5:56 As one of the team that has to mop up the VB6/Textfile Sync/"What the fuck is Normalization" horror that the senior "head of dev" caused (written in a time where C#, json/xml where a thing). I can tell you there are seniors that won't changes their ways unless they are forced to violently by the EOL.

IMO "senior" is not about development/tech skills as such but knowing the company environment (although in practice some people will get hired as seniors still). I.e. you could have a decade of experience in the tech but you don't understand the environment you can still make stupid mistakes. It's about knowing the non-documented dependencies. Practical outcome is that you can be trusted to not make a mess.

After 7 years in industry (few companies, many projects), I don't feel like a senior at all. I rather stuck in this mindset which Prime said to abandon :/ Sometimes when I see some guys saying "I work already 8 months, why I'm still a junior?" I think wtf?

He didn't say experienced engineers ALWAYS hesitant to try new things. You maybe not hesitant but many are. Again, normal human behaviour: being comfortable with what we have. New things start uncomfortable and one with experience needs time and enough motivation to cross that

6:50 This is very common in old projects, especially in languages with terrible tooling like c/c++.

I think the meme is Michael Jordan, 'Stop it, get some help'.

4:30 not all water moves at the same speed. It'd fast in the middle, it can be slow in the outer fringes. Just barely trying. Just enough to get by

This feels more like someone that is disappointed in their own position.