How to Go from Junior to Senior Developer

From rookie to pro. What an exciting journey! Learn what junior, mid-level and senior developers do, and how to go from one level to the next.

What should a junior developer do?

A junior developer is given the problem and the solution. All they have to do is implement it.? As a junior developer, you should:

1. Show that you can understand a requirement.
2. Be able to work on your own, so make sure you read the documentation on Google and Stack Overflow.
3. Ask for help if you get stuck. Be proactive and show what you have tried doing by yourself.
4. Learn to use the basic tools beforehand, for example, Git.?
5. Learn the basics of the programming language you want to pursue a career in, know how to set up a development environment and what tools are required to work.
6. Listen to the feedback given by your peers and mentors. Be prepared to have discussions with them.
7. Follow the best practices established in your company.?
8. Test and test some more. Before you move your task to “ready to test”, make sure you tested it properly. It’s better to have a piece of software that works than to come up with a solution fast but deploying a bug.?
9. Understand the logic when fixing bugs; you don’t want to fix one bug and introduce ten.
10. Ask questions about the tools and technologies that you use, but that are not your responsibility, to understand the whole picture of a system. For instance, if you are a backend engineer, try to understand the CI/CD pipeline, or the cloud infrastructure.

How to go from junior to mid-level developer

So, you know a junior developer is given the problem and the solution. The next step is to find the solution yourself, and that’s what a mid-level developer does.? In other words, to go from junior to intermediate developer, you need to find solutions and then implement them.? How do you do this??

• Studying design patterns, SOLID principles, and best practices of software development.
• Understanding why you are doing what you are doing and being able to explain what you know and why you are doing it.
• Finding a network of more experienced people that will help you with your learning.

Ask mid-level developers how they came up with that solution to discover how they think, so you can start doing the same.?

What does a senior developer do?

A senior developer discovers the problem and helps intermediate developers find a solution by themselves so that they can do the implementation together with the juniors. As a senior developer, you should:

1. Have been exposed to different technologies and problems.
2. Provide technical direction to the business, because you have experience. You should be able to say what’s the best approach to solving a business problem,? what technology to use, and what solution should be avoided.
3. Mentor junior developers, help your and other teams.??
4. Plan sessions, create tasks from business requirements and split big tasks into chunks.
5. Recognize risks (the possibility of not meeting a deadline) and opportunities of improvement (upskilling the team in a particular technology).?
6. Look into other aspects apart from the code, architecture, security, scalability, etc.?

How to go from mid-level to senior developer

To go from mid-level to senior, you need to discover the problem. A senior developer finds the problem and helps the mid-level developer find a solution. They see the big picture and understand how everything works. They also have good interpersonal skills, since they help and mentor mid-level and juniors. They are able to take over the whole development workflow process.

So, basically, you go from being given the problem and the solution, to discovering both of them yourself. If you are a developer and want to go to the next level, plan your next steps. What can you do today that brings you closer to where you want to be? If you are a junior, how can you start discovering problems? If you are at a mid-level, how can you start finding solutions? Going from junior to senior is not about the years of experience; you can spend years being a junior and not doing what you need to become an intermediate developer. To avoid getting stuck, be proactive and understand how everything works. Going from rookie to pro is completely up to you!