Senior Developers Overflow

Being a senior developer means that your impact on the codebase becomes less and less through your individual contributions and more and more through other members of your team. I have worked with different mixes of seniors and juniors in a team, and I have noticed that depending on the junior to senior member ratio, the dynamics of that team could completely change.

Weirdly enough, I haven’t had a great experience with a team of all senior developers. One reason is that senior developers usually end up in a competition to prove themselves. Mainly because there is no other way for them to show their seniority by mentoring others, they end up over-engineering to show off their skills.

Some define senior developers as those who are able to ask the right questions, mainly the questions that wouldn’t occur to a less senior developer. A well-balanced team of senior and junior developers has the benefit of having less friction and better division of labor.

With the fast growth of the software industry came a large influx of new developers who are now becoming senior and staff engineers. Fewer and fewer people find it a good deal to become junior engineers. This means more and more people are going to work in a team dynamic that hasn’t been possible before, and is probably not as effective.

I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future the current role of senior engineer were transformed completely, maybe turning into a more individual contributor role, for example.

In the end, the software industry has proven to move fast and be unpredictable on many occasions. It’s one of the reasons that many people decide to leave it because it requires constant adaptability and your position can never be considered secure, despite the high pay and benefits.

The recent re-organizing and cost-cutting trends show that the future of software development and the prospect of career growth could drastically change in the future.