How Do I Become a Senior Developer? What Is the Difference Between a Junior and Senior Developer?

welcome to this episode of dev questions with tim corey join us as we tackle the questions you are asking about a career in software development understanding the industry and new technology now here's your host expert developer and online educator tim corey at what point do you become a senior developer how do you become a senior developer is there a path to it how do you know you've arrived as a senior developer should you ever apply to a job as a senior senior developer these are great questions and what we're going to talk about today in today's dev question video now if you don't know me my name is tim cory my goal is to make learning c-sharp easier one of the ways i do that is by taking some time in a thursday video and talking through these questions that can really stump you or or set you back and so we're gonna talk it through so you know where you're going and know how to get there now in this video we're talking all about how to become a senior developer one of the things that often surprises people is i don't see a big distinction in c-sharp syntax knowledge between a junior developer even an intern and a senior developer there may be i give rough percentages here this is not scientific but a intern might know 80 to 85 percent of c sharp syntax but yet a senior developer might know 90 so the difference isn't about the c sharp syntax and that's often confusing to people they say well i've learned tons of c sharp stuff i know all about this c stuff why am i not a senior developer and the reason why is because what separates a beginner developer from a senior developer isn't about syntax it's about how to take that syntax and put it together that's called experience and that experience is what sets people apart it's what takes you from a junior developer to a senior developer the more experience you have the more senior you will probably be i say probably because there's experience and then there's experience okay so we'll talk about what experience really means but i have a lot of experience i have over two decades of professional software development experience that means that i've seen a lot of stuff so when i walk into a customer's organization i still do some consulting and i don't usually write code anymore usually what i do is i provide direction instead of fishing myself i teach you how to fish so that's my consulting role these days and so i'll walk into an organization and i will tell them how to do things because i have seen it done before and i'll say okay i've seen before a number of times and here are the pitfalls to avoid here are the things to consider here's how you can kind of direct your development to miss some of these problems and here's what i see down the road here's the the issues you're going to run into so we can avoid those or set yourself up to better point towards your eventual goal not just your beginner goal that's what a senior developer does because a senior developer has seen more situations has experienced them has walked through them and has learned the the painful lessons and the the good lessons as well and so all that adds up to this ex level of experience that makes it easier to approach a new situation using the past knowledge to better guide that future decision now it doesn't mean i've seen it all and it doesn't mean a senior developer has seen it all we haven't but we've seen a lot okay and so there's always going to be this sliding scale there's not a a clear cut this is a junior developer a junior developer has one to five years experience a you know a mid-range developer has five to eight years experience and a senior developer has eight plus years that's not there's not a clear definition like that because that's where it comes back to experience what kind of experience is it all right so let's compare two theoretical developers developer number one works at a consulting agency okay this is what i did when i first started off in development and that developer works at to 15 clients over the course of five years and they build 30 to 50 applications that do various things over those five years that's developer number one developer number two works at one company it's a big company and they're focused on one piece of this application they maintain it they fix the bugs they improve it that one piece that does one thing in the overall application for five years which developer has more experience because they both have five years of experience so it seems like on paper they're both the same but they're not because one developer saw a little window really deeply they saw that little slice they worked on a lot they are very good at it but they uncover the rest the other developer didn't go real deep probably in any of those applications but they wrote lots of them they they saw lots of different scenarios so each has their strengths each has their weaknesses so experience isn't necessarily experience it's not this this clear-cut boundary but the more experience you have the more you will bring to the table at your next job so even though each of these two theoretical developers are different they both bring something to the table when it comes to their next job they both bring some skills so when you become a senior developer it depends okay there isn't a clear-cut line in fact i feel like some days i'm not a senior developer i know i am i've got two decades of experience i've got a lot of breadth of knowledge and depth of knowledge i've done tons of studying i know c pretty well as well as other languages but at the same time there's so much more to learn there's so much that i don't know there's so many areas where i'm like ah it's not i'm that's not my strength so it feels like i'm a senior developer in some areas and i'm a junior developer in other areas and so that's where again imposter syndrome kicks in there's a video on that and this in this series where i say i'm not good enough okay but i am just not in everything okay and that's the same with you there's areas you have strengths in and there's areas that you aren't as good at what you want to do is you want to have a base in kind of a breadth of areas you don't want to focus too narrow on your base so have knowledge of desktop web maybe a little mobile if you can but definitely console services kind of know what all those things are and how to work with them at a base level and then have a specialty where you focus and say you know what i'm gonna be a web developer so i know how to build a desktop app i just don't like to do it that often i know how to create a windows service i know how to talk to a database i know how to do these certain things but my really focus is web development and so i do c-sharp web development and you build more experience in that column but you can't experience everywhere necessarily like i said that guy that had fifth or five years at 15 different jobs that's that's a wider cushion that's that's more that's wider but not so high whereas the person who had one job was really focused narrow has a really deep focus in that area you kind of want both you kind of want to have again that width of the breadth of topics but you want to have a depth in one area and you kind of focus there the more experience you have in that the more you'll be seen as a mid-level and senior developer it's time it's how many scenarios you've seen in that area so if you want to have a senior developer position you need to spend more time in that position that may mean that you have to create some open source projects or you have to volunteer your time at the local animal shelter or somewhere else building applications in that area getting work experience that may you can't get your day-to-day job but to build that experience that resume that portfolio of stuff that you've done in that area that will deepen your skill in that particular area and that particular area you will go from junior developer to mid-level developer to a senior developer all by how much time you spend and how much experience you have in that area okay so i'll come down to experience i know it's difficult it's not something you can test for it's not something where you can study and and say okay now i'm a senior developer because i've studied more it's not a study thing it's a application thing how often have you built something how many apps have you built what have you done in your app building experience start with testing everything you learn i've talked about this before but when you learn something new create a test project actually create two to five and i encourage you to create more towards the five section um but create two to five test projects that just test what you learned now you don't have to have a real project that does anything just create a little application that gets just enough code in there to get you to what you need to learn so it's an if statement just enough code so you can have an if statement in your code that does something okay so and try out different things that right there gives you some experience that's that's base level but does give you some experience then start putting things together into still small but more comprehensive projects that do a few things well that deepens your skill a little bit more in those areas and then create some test project to do something well again your knowledge gonna grow a little more in that area and then you start volunteering your time or creating open source projects or if you you're fortunate enough work at your job in that area now that you're going to grow even more you're going to start seeing more of a depth of experience creating real projects using whatever technology or stack that you are focusing on and you'll see yourself move up that that ranking towards senior developer okay so see a developer it's not about a test it's not about how much you study it's about how much you apply what's your experience level is in that area okay hopefully i answered your questions if you have more questions leave them down below if you have questions for a future dev questions video leave down below i'll put a suggestion list and hopefully you'll see your question answered soon okay thanks for watching as always i am tim corey [Music] you

Channel: IAmTimCorey

Views: 30,748

Rating: 4.9478021 out of 5

Keywords: c#, c# developer questions, c# imposter, dev questions, dev questions series, developer questions, how do i, iamtimcorey, learn c#, tim corey, senior developer, path to senior developer, become a senior software engineer, become senior developer, how to become a senior software developer, from junior dev, junior developer, senior developer vs junior, from junior to senior developer

Id: wGUThGNC93I

Length: 13min 18sec (798 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 23 2020