Who never heard jobs titles like “Senior Software Engineer” or “Senior Database Administrator”?
But this word “senior” has a kind of power, and it is different that you have in mind right now.
OK, senior can be someone high skill graded. But there is a plus here.
In one of my latest projects, I was the architect behind the public APIs of billionaire e-commerce company. And it means that I had to coordinate about 60 teams, each one responsible for one or more microservices. These teams are composed by about:
- 1 QA
- 1 UI Dev
- 3 Devs
- Others like: UX, Product Owner and so on…
And, among the devs, there are a lot of experience levels. From intern to “Megazord Powerful Senior”.
My challenge was coach all these levels of professionals, because when a Junior Dev came to me, asking something, probably five minutes earlier I was talking with some senior guy. Clearly I have to manage the level of the talk to make myself clear.
And I’m not meant Juniors are dummies. Here is my point: If you consider yourself a Senior Professional, you have this responsibility to guide others professionals, because there is a lot of good people, but “fresh”, without that accumulated expertise.
You really should take care about how to do that, because probably you are shaping a lot of professionals: the way of they will work, what they are leaning, how they will do things, where the focus should be and so on. That mean: time and what will be the truth for their careers.
Junior professionals can be very talented guys, with thirst for knowledge and very open mind. If you show the wrong way to them, you are screwing up with the bases of this professional mind/life… the fundamentals of that. Are you really want to be responsible for that?
So, yes: there is this “mechanism”, this segregation with the job titles in the IT. This is wide used to classify responsibilities and wages, for instance. And there is a lot of ways to measure if someone is Senior or Junior (someones are questionable… just saying). But keep it in mind: If you are considered the Senior one, you have the responsibility to take care over a lot of professional carries out there. 🙂
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