Senior in 6 Months? How Is That Supposed to Work?

We're repeatedly asked incredulously how it's supposed to work that junior web developers become seniors in 6 months. After all, you become a senior mainly through experience, and that only comes with time. Right?

Let's look at how juniors manage to become seniors even without years of professional experience. But first, we need to clarify a question:

What is a Senior?

Depending on the company, there are different definitions of what makes senior web developers. Some companies have a criteria catalog or a career framework that defines the requirements for senior developers.

In other companies, it's simply about the time developers have already spent in their job. A junior developer might automatically become a senior after 3 to 5 years.

At DevCraft Academy, we've exchanged ideas with top developers and executives from companies like Facebook, GitLab, or Google. Our definition of juniors and seniors has matured from these conversations:

Juniors

• Knowledge: Have rudimentary knowledge in web development.
• Architecture: Usually only know one way to build applications.
• Complexity: Can work on tasks with low complexity.
• Solutions: Try to find any solution for a specific task.
• Debugging: Often get stuck helplessly when unexpected problems occur.
• Independence: Frequently need support with problems or technical decisions.
• Mentoring: Need mentoring from seniors for their development.
• Quality: Give little thought to the long-term effects of their code.
• Communication: Communicate within the development team.

Seniors

• Knowledge: Have in-depth knowledge in web development, software architecture, and development processes.
• Architecture: Draw on a variety of architectural patterns to develop efficient, performant, and secure solutions.
• Complexity: Can handle tasks of any complexity.
• Solutions: Weigh the pros and cons of multiple solutions.
• Debugging: Master tools and techniques to quickly narrow down and fix errors.
• Independence: Complete their tasks completely independently.
• Mentoring: Promote other developers through their advice and support.
• Quality: Pay attention to high-quality code and keep technical debt low.
• Communication: Communicate confidently across team boundaries with customers and other stakeholders.

Performance

Apart from the qualitative advantages that seniors offer, they also get much more done in the same time. Experts speak of 2 to 4 times the performance that seniors deliver compared to juniors.

In the book "Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering," author Robert L. Glass even illustrates that the best developers are up to 28x as productive as the worst ones.

Since senior developers earn on average less than double what juniors earn, this makes them true bargains. Especially when you consider that juniors additionally need support from seniors.

How Do You Become a Senior?

When this question is asked, the answer usually comes like a shot from a gun: "Through experience!"

Upon more detailed inquiry about what this mysterious experience is, there's great uncertainty. Intuitively, we first think of the professional years a person already has under their belt.

At the same time, it's clear to everyone that two developers with the same number of professional years can have very different experience levels. What's relevant above all is how they spent these years:

• Project Experience: Has the person worked on many different projects or always on the same or similar ones?
• Knowledge: Could the person gain experience with various technologies, best practices, and architectures? Did they continuously educate themselves during this period?
• Problem Solving: Did the person have to overcome many different challenges and find solutions independently?
• Feedback and Mentoring: Did the person continually receive constructive feedback on their work to sharpen their skills? Were experienced developers at their side to show them the way at the decisive moment?
• Teamwork: Was the person part of different teams with diverse people and thus able to work on their communicative and organizational skills?

When we break down experience this way, we recognize that the time period plays a subordinate role. Much more important is building these experience values quickly and specifically.

Becoming a Senior with DevCraft Academy

We founded DevCraft Academy for exactly this purpose. Our program targets all aspects of building experience and is also individually adapted to individual developers so they can get the maximum experience for themselves in the shortest time.

This is how we proceed:

• We equip developers in daily knowledge units with the knowledge that is essential for senior web developers and that they still lack.
• Each knowledge unit has tricky exercises to deepen the knowledge and build the competence to solve problems.
• Developers receive feedback on all their solutions. They also train to give constructive feedback to others to support them in their development.
• Developers gain additional project experience in several team projects. They practice modern web development, development processes, and teamwork in practice.
• In weekly mentoring sessions, our experienced top developers take care of all open questions and show solution approaches when you don't know how to proceed.

With this mix of theory, practice, and mentoring and the individual personal adaptation of the program, developers manage to build within a few months all the experience that characterizes senior developers.

Since our program is part-time alongside work, their progress becomes visible in everyday work after just a few weeks.

This way, developers become competent and productive members of their development teams in the shortest time. They gain more confidence and more enjoyment in development and mature into reliable developer personalities.

And they themselves are usually most astonished at the tremendous leap they've made in just a few months.