!rant

I see a lot of crap about junior vs senior devs nowadays. I think the distinctions are small.

In reality senior devs have been burnt more in the past by their own mistakes or have seen mistakes by other people. That's about it.

What other distinguishing characteristics have you found?

To add to this. When I first started working I used to jump immediately into coding. Now, after quite a few years I have started spending a lot more time in upfront thinking, knowing full well that the coding is, generally, the easy part.

I think senior devs generally have more experience and take responsibility for the juniors

As a senior dev you have this realisation often: "oh shit, I've done this before - no need to write virgin code, just dig up that old repo"

Also it's related to having at least more concepts clear, since senior devs have seen in practice design patterns, refactoring, enterprise architecture, ha, etc. In contrast to jr devs who have just being on contact of the theory. IMHO.

@nickhh I've met junior devs who are more expert on a language than their senior but what sets the seniors apart are their exposure to the real world.

When scoping - knowing the right questions to ask and not making any assumptions, makes sure both parties have the same understanding of the requirements.

When designing - being able to work on the details but still keeping in mind the bigger picture and having a better understanding about how the whole thing should work. They will design solutions with performance, reusability and maintainability in mind instead of the 'make it work->make it faster->refactor' cycle that sometime happen with Juniors

I could go on and on.

Of course all this comes only if the seniors learn from their mistakes and experiences, and trust me when I say there are seniors out there in the wild who never learn and aren't worth shit. And if you have never encountered them then may your God help you when you do

senior devs have more curved backs than junior devs

@Alt-Grrr what is the average age?