Don’t fool yourself: you need senior developers too
Introduction
I have seen too many companies fool themselves into thinking that they can get by with junior developers, or only hiring engineers who are smart enough to pass the coding interviews but not experienced enough to be able to make major decisions on their own.
While hiring junior developers can provide some short-term benefits, it will hurt your company in the long term.
Some mistakes won’t be evident until it is too late to do anything about them.
Anyone can write code that works, I could do it when I was 7 and I learned by myself with the help of a few books (I had no internet back then). But not everyone knows how to keep the code clean and avoid unnecessary complexity as the project grows.
You need senior developers if you want to build a truly great team with true leaders who can help guide your company toward success.
You can’t teach experience
As much as you may want to believe that experience is something that can be taught, it simply isn’t. You can’t learn or gain experience from reading a book or taking some online course.
Experience comes from doing things, and making mistakes while doing them.
If you want to build a software development team, you need experienced people on your team who have been through the trenches before and have learned lessons already.
It’s not just about “man hours”.
A lot of new developers learn their skills by reading books and online tutorials, so they get stuck in this “learn by doing” mindset without actually having any real-world experience under their belts yet.
They think that if they just keep learning about all these new technologies and tools (which are often changing), then eventually they’ll become better at what they do!
Sisyphus would be proud is what I am saying. But they can’t hold a candle to someone who has several systems that are being used and in production.
There is something about getting “feedback” from stakeholders that reading a book or just writing a small personal project will never give you.
Senior developers are more than just smart
Let’s say it again, for my ego’s sake: senior developers are more than just smart.
They have experience, knowledge, and wisdom that can help you avoid common mistakes and learn new technologies and practices.
They may even be able to help you solve problems before they occur, and some of them are very costly.
A good senior developer will warn you about the danger ahead of time so that you can make better decisions. They will kill your false hopes and help you build a strategy that is grounded in the reality of what your team can do.
They will keep your developers from making too much of a mess.
In general, without senior developers, your code will have more and more errors as it grows, development speed will be slower as the system keeps getting more complex, and even onboarding new developers will get more and more expensive.
In a few words: a good senior software developer will prevent your system from rotting and dying.
It takes a long time to become a senior developer
We’ve talked about the senior developer. You probably know that a senior developer has been coding for a long time, but what else do they have in common?
They’ve worked on many different technologies, with many different teams and projects, in many different situations.
They’ve worked with other developers who can’t write code well enough to meet their standards so they needed to step up and help them out.
They’ve worked with management and other stakeholders who don’t understand technology well enough.
They can help you fill a lot of gaps and prevent a lot of costly mistakes, make decisions and provide counsel on technical matters, and generally guide your team in the right direction.
When you hire a senior developer, you’re getting someone who has many years of experience. And while they won’t necessarily be able to teach every junior developer on your team everything they know (this would take years), they will be able to share some wisdom with them.
Also, since senior devs have been through the process many times before, they may even know how something should work just by looking at it!
Don’t expect a senior developer to be a 10X super fast developer, expect them to be expert developers. So don’t expect senior developers to go faster, expect them to go better, and to be able to help your whole team “go better”.
The benefits of senior developers are long-term, they are not cheap but they are worth it
Senior developers are worth keeping around, but they’re not the type of employee you can just hire whenever you need them. They’re expensive and they take time to get up to speed with your company culture before they become productive members of your team.
The benefits of having senior developers are long-term, but well worth the effort.
Senior developers bring a vitality and energy to teams that can be hard to find elsewhere.
They help with communication between coworkers, assist new hires in acclimating quickly, and help make sure everyone is working from a shared understanding instead of just assuming things are crystal clear (which they rarely are).
In addition to this kind of day-to-day work, senior developers also bring experience and intuition that can shape product development decisions over time by providing context for what seems intuitive at first glance but may actually require extra research or iteration before implementation.
You can expect some eureka moments when working with a good senior developer or a good senior software engineer.
Senior developers are great for making major decisions, providing counsel and leading teams
While senior developers are great at making major decisions and providing counsel, they also bring a lot of value to the table in other ways. Senior developers are very good at leading teams, which can be extremely helpful if you’re a manager or project lead.
If you’re responsible for managing a team of junior developers (or newbs, as we call them), having senior people on hand who understand how things work will allow you to save time and money by avoiding common mistakes.
They may even help bring new tools to the table to help make your management work easier.
Additionally, because so many problems are unique (even when they occur often), having someone with experience handling similar situations is always useful. Software development is about problem-solving, after all.
Conclusion
You want to grow. And senior software developers and senior software engineers have seen some companies grow. And they know the pains of growing.
If you have people around who have dealt with “growing” issues before — and know how best to deal with them now — then the process should go much smoother!
If you’re thinking about building a team, don’t forget that senior developers are an essential part of it. Their experience and knowledge will help your business grow faster than if you were to hire junior or mid-level developers only.
You may have heard the saying “You can’t teach experience,” but what does that actually mean?
It means that senior developers deeply understand how software works and how it is made, which makes them invaluable when solving problems related to the software development process.
They are comfortable with the chaos and can guide your team out of it, or even better, help them avoid it altogether.
