How to determine if you are a Junior, Mid or Senior at Software Development?

Intro

Hello to all!

This is my first post on the internet EVER, so let’s start with a small disclaimer.

I am not judging anyone in this article. Everyone has their own understanding and opinion of development, processes, leveling and etc.

I am writing this post in order to get some things straight in my head and if possible to help people around the development realm in finding their level of understanding the technologies they are working with.

That’s one HUGE sentence. First timer, remember…

You know some stuff, that’s for sure. You have been on a development job for the past several days, months, years or even decades. But is the experience the most important part of the equation?

There are many ways of classifying the developers in categories. For me the categories are:

• Solution implementer
• Problem solver
• Problem finder

Solution Implementer

This one is equal to the early stages of a Junior level in the general leveling system.

Like the name implies this is a person who feels comfortable at implementing the final solution. If you are a Junior at your company, most likely you are waiting for the more experienced developers or Tech Lead to give you guidelines after which you can solve you tasks.

The important part for you at this stage is to listen and ask questions. Then you will start seeing the whole picture of the feature, bug or any other task you might have. With time you can gain knowledge of how to become a Problem Solver.

Problem Solver

This is a person who can determine the solution of a problem. The problem could be a database related issue, architectural decision or some new very complex feature.

If you are such person, you are somewhere on the scale between later stages of Juniorship (if such word exists) and Middle ground.

As the more junior developers, you are also receiving tasks from someone, but in your case the tasks could be massive. They can consist of many small tasks or processes which need to be implemented.

Problem Finder

A problem finder is a person who people don’t always agree with. The reason is because as the name again implies, these people search for trouble everywhere. From code smells, to deployment processes, such people always prepare for the worst and do their best to keep their projects up and running without any downtime.

They generate tasks which in the Project Management terms can be referred as epics.

Then, those epic become features, the features become tasks and tada! Software engineering.

Ok, that’s it so far. Please let me know what you think of my classification.

If you have anything that you agree or disagree with in this post, feel free to put a comment down below.

The End.