Differences between a junior, mid-level, and senior developer

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  • Amit Shekhar
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    Amit Shekhar
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Differences between a junior, mid-level, and senior developer

I am Amit Shekhar, I have taught and mentored many developers, and their efforts landed them high-paying tech jobs, helped many tech companies in solving their unique problems, and created many open-source libraries being used by top companies. I am passionate about sharing knowledge through open-source, blogs, and videos.

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In this blog, we are going to learn about the differences between a junior, mid-level, and senior developer.

How do you spot the differences between a junior, mid-level, and senior developer?

Fresh minds have more intelligence, experienced minds have more wisdom and in between lies a spectrum of intelligence and wisdom.

Senior developer

A Senior developer was once a junior developer and knows what are mistakes junior developers and mid-level developers can make. Because of his experiences, a senior developer shows the following traits:

  1. He knows how to build all the components and knows how they work together.

  2. He can think and evaluate new frameworks/technologies because of his experiences with older technologies.

  3. A senior developer has more clarity about the estimated time taken for development.

  4. He knows what can work, but most importantly he also knows what cannot work. He can think end to end and all edge cases.

  5. He will always try to learn and improve his coding skills and you can often see them interacting with younger developers, willing to help them and exchange wisdom in return for new insights!

Mid-level developer

A mid-level developer in his career timeline experience new types of roadblocks in development. He kind of starts knowing what can be done and what cannot be done. His interaction with senior developers let him know about the things that can be done.

His interaction with junior developers lets him know about what new things can be experimented with. Based on his career timeline, he can show the following traits:

  1. He knows how to build two components and how can they work together.

  2. He prefers consulting senior developers before integrating new frameworks.

  3. He gets to know he cannot do everything all alone, so he starts seeking help from others instead of getting stuck.

  4. He somehow starts knowing about the time estimation for the completion of a project.

Junior developer

A junior developer is yet to see the bigger picture of development. Mostly, they are freshers out of colleges.

A not so very good thing about the way education is carried in most of the colleges is that "Project-based learning" is not yet adopted and therefore, a junior developer takes time to know about the implication of building real-life projects.

Here are a few traits you can observe in a junior developer:

  1. He may know how to build a component, but may not know how to integrate with other components.

  2. Having enthusiasm for new technologies, he may come up with insights on integrating new technologies and frameworks.

  3. He may sound arrogant and may have a delusion that he is self-sufficient so you may not ask him to take help from others. Another factor that may stop him from seeking help can be his hesitancy in talking with new people at the workspace.

  4. He may think if a code is working, he should not spend time improving the efficiency of the code. This rigidity comes from his inexperience in the bigger picture of the development world.

  5. He may not be aware of all the edge cases.

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That's it for now.

Thanks

Amit Shekhar

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