The One and Only Factor That Will Make You a Senior Developer

You can’t “cram” your way into a senior developer position.

A while back I saw a course on Udemy that would essentially take you from a Junior developer to a Mid-Senior level.

What was in it? Lots and lots of technologies. Lots of topics. The idea was to basically skim the surface of large amounts of software and concepts and in the end, you emerge a butterfly. You can then call yourself a Mid or Senior level!

The problem is that this isn’t at all how one matures as a developer, largely because most of us will forget what we learned at the beginning of the course by the time we reach the end. We don’t use these technologies in our jobs or our day to day activities. It is true that “What you don’t use, you lose.”

Another reason this approach doesn’t work is that Senior devs aren’t supposed to know everything. They don’t have all the answers.

I remember when this became a reality to me in my first corporate software job after years of freelancing.

In a standup, one day the PM asked if a certain senior dev could take on a new task. Surprisingly, he said, “I have no experience with x and think it would be better to pass it to someone else here who is more comfortable with taking that on.”