Ok, so I already asked when junior is no longer a junior..got mixed answers. Now I'd like to know what defines seniority level in your country?! Years of experience, having wide range of knowledge, great leadership skills, having boobs (joke).. ?!? But seriously, I have no clue what the standards in my country are, and internet is full of different opinions & examples that are making me wanna go cry in a corner.. o.O

Figured some answers from real people might help me get my head around this, so if it's not too much to ask fellow devs here, please answer this questions to help me grasp this better with examples..& non dev folks, you are welcome to comment too!!

A) What country are you guys from?
B) How is seniority defined there?
C) How are you placed by others?
D) If different, where would you place yourselves? Why?

++ because boobs

A) USA
B) Can you make one call and have someone fired?
C) I work in a company with 2 devs, a qa guy, then 30 people who manufacture safes and bank vaults, and 20 people who sell those safes. We are the weirdos in the corner, nobody cares what we think.
D) Working in Venice beach was nice, company had higher percentage of devs so it was ok to have nerdy conversations all day with everybody.

I have more seniority currently, but the people over me don't listen, I preferred the egalitarian attitude of the startup world.

@Alice @d4ng3r0u5 zomg! 😂😂😂😂

@gorsamp option B is quite scarry.. it has nothing to do with competance o.O

++ on rant, no new comments.. 🤔meh.. //😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

@sladuled is the crying commented out? I could -- rant to change it up

Has nothing to do with age or length of working experience.

A junior is a person who needs constant guidance. Particularities about a junior:

* Inconsistent code. While solving a task, skill and experience increases, so the code written at the end of a task contains better elements than the code written at the beginning of a task. Happens with everyone who starts off with a new tech.

* Prone to stupid mistakes and making tons of bugs in the code

* Comes up with "epic new solution" for something for which specific best practices exist, which, coincidently, are better.

* The "I don't know what I'm doing" syndrome. A certain weird piece of code that keeps repeating in different places, that does nothing useful, but looks kewl. Ex. writing every SQL query with minimum 1 CTE and a final SELECT * from that CTE. Or a general try/catch block for the entire method, on each method, that just re-throws the exception.

When one stops showing these signs, one can be considered a mid-level developer

Oh, and I worked with Russian, German, American, Costa Rican, Canadian teams, to get this overall understanding of what a junior is.

So...

A) Germany

B) Mastery (see post above)

C) Senior, though in Germany they might skip the title for HR management reasons. I don't care.

D) Depends on field. What I'm best at - senior. In Frontend web development I'd place myself as a Junior with a decade of experience. Good thing I'm not doing that.

Senior in back-end and data processing because it takes me 30 minutes to provide the best solution for a problem that 90% of candidates as my colleague would take 2 hours to solve in the shittiest, most inefficient way.

@gorsamp Haha yes, that is a comment... Now this is real 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 😂😂😇

@AndSoWeCode nice, thanks for feedback!

A) UK.

B) Generally by who the boss listens to the most. Age experience etc are less important than the gift of the gab. or even more importantly results.

C) i am the Tech lead where i am now (a startup ). We have a small dev team (4 devs + 1 qa + 1 infrastructure). were pretty relaxed everyone gets to speak there mind and make suggestions etc. I just spend more times in meetings with the MD and sales/ops.

D) I'm happy with where i am now i think as long as that is the case i will stay. i had a friend who recently moved companies, he had been there for years since uni but still had not been promoted past junior and even though he was one of the best on the team at this point new hires were getting better offers, sometimes you need a clean slate. i think people still saw the "student hire" even years later, now he has no problem being taken seriously.

A. Israel

B. In corporate companies, you'll need at least 5+ years of experience to be considered a senior. The Hi-Tech industry here is big and fast-growing, so to avoid "whoring" around titles, they set some solid criteria for seniority - so even if you're very bright and provide good results constantly, but with fewer years of experience, you're unlikely to get the title. It's a questionable strategy, I suppose.

C. I'm an intermediate with some senior privileges :) In some areas I'm the only source of knowledge in the team, so I get to make the decisions.

D. I'm perfectly content with my status. The responsibility of being a senior is still a terrifying concept to me.

@NickyBones dude, you sound like me.. o.O