The Developer’s Edge: How To Become A Senior Developer
The full updated version of this article can now be found here!
This is Part 2 of a series of articles for programmers looking to upgrade their skills. Part 1 took us through the very beginning stages where we set out to find the most efficient way to go from zero to an employable developer. Today, we are going to take things a whole lot further. I also just released two online courses for developers: The Complete Web Developer in 2022 and The Complete Junior to Senior Web Developer Roadmap
This article is for all the developers, coders, programmers out there who are looking to make a jump in their career after having had a few years in the industry (or you may be just starting out but would like to see the sort of path you have to go on). This article is for those with a simple desire: You want to be considered a Senior Developer and you want to excel in your field. By the end of reading this, you will have a set path with a list of the best resources for you to level up and become a senior developer. Woaa! bold statement. Hope I got you hooked. Let’s dive in.
Disclaimer: As with all things in life, you can always set your own path. Although this is not meant to be the only way, it is a method that I have discovered in my own career, and through many conversations and interviews I have had in the past year with people I consider senior and respected programmers in the community. I have accumulated all of the commonalities into this post. Underneath all of this is not just an article on how to become a better developer. It is a how to guide on optimizing your time with efficient and useful tools so that you get the most out of your life. You can take this sort of learning anywhere in the future.
What Do We Want?
We all strive to be better at our jobs. What the specifics of that statement may be is up to the individual person. However, most people can agree on a few common things:
- We don’t want to go through life being seen as ‘incompetent’
- We want to be respected by our coworkers
- We want to feel smart and accomplished
- We want to feel appreciated
In order to achieve the above, we can’t just rest on our laurels, and expect things to come to us. Especially in the world of programming, where the technology is always changing, and the amount of information available to us is overwhelming, we want to focus our attention on growing and learning without burning out. With more and more developers coming out of colleges and bootcamps, we need to keep our skills sharp, and the way to set yourself apart is to be smart and efficient when learning. Enough talk, let’s dive in. As always we will try and take the best approach.
What Is A Senior Developer?
No, being a polyglot who can code in 10 different programming languages and has built their own version of Jarvis does not make you a senior developer (although you are very talented). This is because a senior developer is someone who brings an incremental benefit to the table. It is someone that makes people around him or her better, and is someone that is able to have a long term vision, deliver, and consistently produce business value. You can know all the cool functional programming techniques in the world, but if you are unable to communicate well with your team, or you are not able to focus on delivering actual value to a customer, you are not a senior developer. This is the important point: What value do you bring to your company/startup/business? If you are one of the few people who can bring order of magnitude (some people love the idea of 10x ) value to your company or business, you are a senior developer. Senior Developer is not just another job title, but rather, the ability to use your experiences to provide real benefit to the stakeholders.
Got It. How Do I Become One?
This is the section all of you have been waiting for (or so I am imagining… maybe nobody reads this…In which case i’ll just keep talking to myself). Let’s dig in and see if we can make it through everything. Follow the below resources and spend some time learning about each topic. If you are able to actively work on the below skills, you will be miles ahead of everybody else. I call this the Developer’s Edge: there will always be people with more experience than you in a field, but you can work smarter, and in a more efficient manner to accumulate different combinations of skills to set you apart. This not only makes you a better developer, it also increases your overall happiness because you are providing real value to people.
An often overlooked aspect of learning is that you need to specialize and focus solely on one thing. However, that is not how life works. It is very rare in life that you require just one skill. Especially in a field like technology where things are changing (who knows what Machine Learning engineers will be doing in 5 years?), you need to have a diverse set of transferable skills that will translate into you being adaptable.
These are the 6 core skills you will need to be considered a senior developer:
…to see the 6 core skills, the full version of this article can now be found here.
One last thing…
I created two online courses: The Complete Web Developer in 2022 and The Complete Junior to Senior Web Developer Roadmap. In the first one, I walk you through the entire steps I mentioned above if you want everything in one place, extra help or you want to support my work. Each course has over 100 HD videos and 30 hours of content. They took an insane # of hours to make. But I’m really proud of how everything turned out.
Thank you for reading this far. If you enjoyed this post, please share, comment, and press that 👏 a few times. . .Maybe it will inspire someone to make the jump into a new career.
Follow me on Twitter and subscribe to my blog here if you’re interested in more in-depth and informative write-ups like these in the future! By the way, my full time job is to teach people how to code in the most efficient way possible. You can see my courses at zerotomastery.io/courses
