![]() ![]() Most job ads call for an experienced candidate. The reality is more complex than that, but for the sake of this brief article it suffices to say that the leader sets the tempo of the team, and the best leaders lead from behind as a Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School puts it: Leaders can encourage breakthrough ideas not by cultivating followers who can execute but building communities that can innovate. The juniors stay curious and motivated to learn more.The seniors learn the domain knowledge and share their technical knowledge with the juniors.The experts share their domain and technical knowledge with the seniors and juniors.The leader’s main challenge is to make sure everyone is moving in the right direction across the team: They usually need more info to distill the simple questions to more specific ones for the problem in hand and then give a “yes”/“no”. That is because the experts can see the problems in depth with cons and pros and the inevitable trade-offs. ![]() When you ask a general question from an expert you usually don’t get a simple “yes”/“no” answer but rather a “yes and no” or “it depends”. Experts can fluently use the technical jargon of the domain, but what separates them from the seniors is their holistic understanding of how software is used to solve the business problems. The border between seniors and experts is not that obvious. When someone is head hunted from a rival company, there’s a good chance that they already know the domain, therefore they can be considered an expert. It is just a pun in job descriptions that excites the older juniors. When someone knows a technology well, they have a good idea about the limitations and strengths of the tech.Īlso, age has nothing to do with seniority. A quick test of seniority is to ask them about the things they don’t like about the tech stack. People are different: they learn different things at different speeds and each one has a unique knowledge.Īn experienced developer may learn the technology in a couple of days and become senior. It is important to note that these titles are not permanent. But if they know the tech stack, they can be considered senior. When someone just joins the team, they are by default at the junior level no matter how many years of experience they have. They are the ones with a cohesive understanding of the business as a whole. The experts unleash the true power of the team by spreading their knowledge in the domain and tech stack. Your challenge is to learn the domain knowledge to understand the context of the code and why it is structured in a certain way to solve a certain set of problems.Īn expert’s main challenge is to help seniors and juniors engineer a solution that solves the domain specific problems. You can read their code but you have no idea about the problem it solves. NET and you’re hired at a company which writes. You may also have to unlearn some things in order to fully absorb the new things.Ī senior’s main challenge is to learn the domain. If you have previous experience with something similar or computers in general you learn faster. This doesn’t necessarily have to take that long. You’re new to the company, and they use Node, React, Python… you have to learn their tech stack as the first step to becommimg productive. Instead of focusing on the requirements for a role, we can get a better definition by looking at the challenges of each level.Ī junior’s main challenge is to learn the technology. The best way I have come up with to define these titles is by looking at the challenges they face. One that I particularly find interesting is about their problem solving skills: As I grew into my career and worked with people with different skills, I came to assign a specific meaning with each of those terms that describes different dimensions of people’s skills. I have worked with a lot of programmers from different countries in various business sectors from telecom and insurance to online banking and health care.Ģ0 years ago when I was a beginner, the words “expert” and “senior” or “leader” meant more or less the same thing to me. I have been in the software business for 2 decades. ![]()
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