Classifying the Various Levels of Developers (Junior, Mid & Senior)

It feels fulfilling to be at the very top of the hierarchy of any ranking system. Like in Naruto (a childhood anime), a Ninja is either a Genin (beginner), a Chunin (mid), or a Jounin (advanced). Being a developer can feel like this, there’s a name for your skill level at any point in time: Junior, Mid, or Senior and then, there is also Lead (this is like the Hokage of software development).

Firstly, we ought to establish that the “years of experience” is not the only yardstick to measure the various levels of developers, there are varying standards and measurements for this which will be our focus. We noticed that some recruiters and developers have a vague idea of this classification, it is evident in the tech ads that we see on media spaces and in resumes that developers wave in the faces of recruiters regularly.

In this article, we will be sharing our opinions on the topic that will hopefully save you the time, stress, and confusion concerning this classification.

Some questions we will be answering include:

What are the differences between the 3 different levels highlighted?

How do you know when you need a junior, mid or senior developer?

What expectations should you have when you hire a certain level of developers?

Juniors

The role of a junior developer is an entry-level position. This does not imply complete ignorance but a junior can be a greenhorn to the workflows and the full lifecycle of software development. They require supervision, instruction, and guidance. They are expected to be able to strike a balance between asking for help and finding solutions.

At the least, they should be familiar with one programming language, one IDE, frequently used APIs, simple select statements for databases, and they should know platforms where they can get quick answers e.g Stack Overflow.

This level of developers is quite affordable, they can be hired by Startups to build an MVP or by Corporates to join a bigger team. They quickly adjust to your company culture and can easily learn and grow with your team. We do advise that there is at least someone senior to supervise them, there was a case of a junior engineer that deleted the entire database of a company unknowingly. If there was no backup, this would have been a very costly mistake.

Mid-level

This group is somewhere in-between junior and senior-level but it is safe to say it is more inclined towards the senior level. Mid-level developers have probably been through the whole development cycle at least once. They have made many simple mistakes and have learned enough from them to be fairly competent. Unlike juniors, they can take up fairly difficult tasks with little supervision and can handle major bug fixes. They can break down major tasks into smaller sub-tasks and even coordinate juniors.

At this level, they should be familiar with coding best standards and practices, coding documentation, and some project management tools e.g Jira. They care about the readability of code, design patterns, automated testing, proper documentation, and know the ins and outs of code collaboration.

They are a worthwhile investment for employers who do not have the time and budget to train juniors or the huge salaries to keep seniors satisfied.

Senior

A senior developer is skilled enough to handle the complexities of a product from initialization through development to production, they write with maintainability and scalability in mind.

They can work both independently and manage teams, they have technical direction and can quickly spot and fix bugs because of their professional years of experience doing the same. Familiarity with multiple languages and the ability to multi-task is also part of their selling point.

They can set and decide code design and architecture and break down the entire task into simple and mid-level tasks for junior and mid-level teams under their supervision.

They are always a great investment to lead your team and handle complex products as long as you can sell them your vision or pay a really good salary.

The bottom line of this article is to give you an idea of the classes of developers and what to know about their skill sets and their efficiency as it pertains to your product. This is not set in stone, you should be creative with your choices and skill combination but we hope this article informs your choices better.

We are always excited to help, while you focus on other areas of productivity. CodeLn is your foremost platform for recruiting tech talents, with a pool of over 14,000 developers, you can build the most diverse development team with just the click of your mouse. Speak with us today! info@codeln.com or visit https://www.codeln.com