If you’re part of the tech industry, you probably know this problem: lots of middle developers are considered senior developers, and many junior developers end up in mid-level developer positions.
Why is that?
In my experience as a CTO who has hired and managed many developers in the past few years, it all boils down to issues like:
According to data from the European Commission, Poland has been experiencing a skill shortage in IT equivalent to 50,000 developers missing from the market. The situation isn’t any better in the United States, where there are 920,000 unfilled IT positions.
As you can see, skill shortage in IT is a risk affecting companies all over the world. Add to that the following issues:
We’re dealing with unclear definitions of junior, mid, and senior developer roles, HR chairs, and developers themselves getting confused on the job market.
In this article, I will clarify what mid-level developer and senior developer roles are all about to help you navigate through the tech landscape. As a CTO, I believe this topic to be critical to how we build Poland’s position in the IT outsourcing market.
So, let’s start at the beginning.
A junior developer with generally more than a year of experience in commercial projects can become a mid-level specialist. They play a critical role in IT because the impact they deliver lies in routine code.
A mid-level dev is largely independent and responsible. Thanks to their experience, middle developers can develop solutions to simpler problems or find information about other opportunities. Communication and other soft skills are an important part of their skill set too.
A middle developer has solid technical and coding skills such as:
After all, mid-level developers have already worked through most of their "childhood" challenges as junior developers. ;)
Just to give you an example from our tech stack:
In my experience, middle devs are people who tend to be 26+ years old, but this isn’t a rule set in stone (so many people transition their careers to IT and become great developers too).
Here are some tell-tale signs that you have a great mid-level developer in front of you:
They have at least one year of commercial experience.
Ok, so how do you become a senior developer?
First of all, it pays to remember that seniority is about more than hard skills. Technical skills are just the foundation or starting point.
Among the technical skills of a senior developer, you can find everything I mentioned related to mid-level developers and more:
All of the skills above are a must-have. But what really differentiates a senior developer from a mid-level is their attitude, mindset, and soft skills. And developers tend to forget about that as a key part of the software development process. ;-)
You’re probably wondering about one thing now...
This ability is crucial: combining hard and soft skills successfully.
There are no ideals here, of course. But if I had to show you a pattern, a role model senior dev would be an experienced frontend or backend specialist who knows how the others work or had a full-stack episode in their career. This person has at least 5 years of commercial experience and many projects on their back. Ultimately, they realize the full-stack model and their skills match the team’s needs perfectly.
You can call yourself a senior developer if:
It all depends on your environment.
Each company approaches this differently. For example, at MasterBorn we have a natural knowledge exchange happening across teams.
We focus on teamwork and cooperation, which is why we actually have several people on the border of mid and senior devs. There are technical seniors who have technical skills, and experience in battle - but their main strength is focusing on the tasks at hand.
We care a lot about their development and the natural growth of mid-level developers towards the senior level. Conditionally, these people also have want that. You might find this surprising, but that’s not always the case - and that's OK!
Yes, definitely.
As a CTO, I understand that some people will remain mid-level developers with 7 or 10 years of experience simply because they don’t feel like developing soft skills and prefer to focus on their technical competencies instead.
Pushing such a person towards empathy and becoming an extrovert is a bad idea. It’s not going to work out for anyone - not for the software engineer, the entire team, and the project.
At MasterBorn, we also have a place for great (sometimes outstanding) field experts who are sometimes difficult to communicate with. In such cases, my role is to manage the process and build a comfortable working environment for them (and the entire team).
One of our company values is acceptance, and you can see how it works in practice in such cases. We help our programmers to develop more empathy and mutual awareness. We want them to become more open-minded - and to achieve that, we always share feedback openly and give them the right to be themselves or realize their values at work.
Not everyone has to be promoted "vertically" - from junior developer all the way to senior - and I'm fine with that.
Here are a few misconceptions in how recruiters tend to differentiate between these two roles:
First of all, I encourage you to avoid fixating on the title here. It doesn’t matter what position you have in the company, but what value you bring to the team. By focusing on values and communication, you will see how the senior level comes around organically.
Sometimes a junior developer is worth much more than a senior developer. Seriously, I have witnessed such a case once, so I personally look for people focused on work, cooperation, and impact. And then I’m pretty sure the title will appear naturally with time.
I hope that this article showed you the importance of soft skills and where you should focus in your professional development to land the job of your dreams.
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