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I'm picky. For me that's an intermediate developer. What I want to see in a senior developer is that they make everybody else on the team more effective.

As I've gotten older, I've started to appreciate how much farther a good developer can go rather than just these things. I think the kinds of things you talk about are things that most people can accomplish in 5-10 years. But how do you differentiate between that and someone with 20-30 years of experience?

Because the industry has been expanding so fast, we have perpetually been in the situation where most programmers are younger. But I don't think it will be too long before you will see half your team having 20 years of experience. If you ask yourself, "How am I going to improve after I've worked 5-10 years" and "How much better can you get" I think it is instructive.

My experience has been that you can get a lot better, but that it's very hard to see the difference from the perspective of being a junior or intermediate developer.




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