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What is the difference between a junior and a senior software developer? 15 things I wish I had known sooner

Your DevOps Guy on September 13, 2020

This article was originally published in my blog www.yourdevopsguy.com. What is the difference between a junior and a senior developer? ...
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pentacular

The most important thing is that a senior developer should understand which things aren't important.

Junior developers don't have the experience to judge this, and so everything seems critically important -- you'll often see Junior developers get into heated arguments about things which just aren't important.

Most things don't matter most of the time, but it takes experience to be able to see which things actually do matter, and where.

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Your DevOps Guy

Absolutely. Seniors need to prioritize tasks and decide what brings the most value to their team.

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Carlos Garcia ★

Another important one that I sometimes still struggle with: learn to delegate. As you need to focus on more important tasks you need to put aside the ones that are trivial or do not require your whole skill set, but that still need to be done to fulfill the big picture.

To earn trust you must give trust in return. Find the most suitable person among your teammates and colleagues to perform such tasks, or even a junior dev whose skills and knowledge would benefit from fulfilling it, even if you need to put a couple of hours into teaching or supervising them. In the long run the payoff will be worth it.

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Paweł Kowalski • Edited

X) Think long and hard before you write any code, maybe its just easier and cheaper to buy it for $5 a month to verify proof of concept.

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Lane Wagner

Bonus: Know the basics of computer science, not just programing: qvault.io/big-o-algorithms/

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Laprikon

Thank you for these recommendations.

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Your DevOps Guy

Happy to share my experience to help others.

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Jon Randy 🎖️ • Edited

What is the difference between a junior and a senior developer?

Honestly? Age. It's been this way everywhere I've worked in 25 years as a developer

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Your DevOps Guy

You are right, there is a correlation between years of experience and being a senior. However,

There are people with 10 years of experience and people who have experienced the same year ten times

You need to push yourself to keep growing. It is a mix of experience and attitude (leadership).

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✨ Enoch Ojonimi Daniels ♛✮

Very inspiring and educative write up . I have learnt a couple of things I most tend to ignore

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Your DevOps Guy

Glad you liked it and found it useful.