[softwaredoug]

You say "programmatic & design qualities" but I actually think a senior developer is more productive because they enhance team health by creating vision, mentoring junior devs, and effectively articulating their vision. This ultimately is the difference: can you expand your productivity by setting the team's pace and get others bought into a vision on how things should be done? If no, you could be the smartest tech wizard in the world, I'm not sure you'd be an effective senior dev.

A senior dev helps ensure the team is healthy. What's a good team?

- Do they get sh*t done. Do they deliver what they need to? Does it ultimately work?

- Do they work well with others. Do they serve their customers and stakeholders? Or are they perceived as a bunch of a-holes?

- Do they have a healthy mix of new talent/ideas and seniority?

- Does the team develop emotional safety and trust? Are constructive differences of opinion brought into the open, or is dissent stifled causing conflict to fester?

- Do they know what they're after? Have they self organized around shared culture, principles, and working practices for getting there?

A good senior dev is like one of the "team captains". The team captain is a top player that pushes the other players to produce, but also learns how to leverage and mentor fellow teammates in the game.

[Buttons840]

I've always wondered if a developer who gets shit done would be offended if I told them what they've done is shit.

[Jtsummers]

Yes, they do get offended. I've done that before because the code was shit. I appreciated that he got it done faster than I would have, but I didn't appreciate that:

1. He wouldn't clean it up.

2. I had to clean it up (it needed to be kept around and extended).

3. He got all the credit even though his was an unmaintainable, unextendible (necessary for the effort, not just a want) mess.

4. I was the one who, after cleaning it up, actually made it a deliverable and added the critical missing parts (around extensibility).

[aprdm]

Really depends on how much trust and empathy there's in the team.. I say my stuff is shit all the time and am okay w/ others saying it too in the context of my team.

If a random person emails me saying my code is shit -- not so well as I lack rapport w/ them. But, if random person emails me saying why my code isn't ideal and how I could improve, that would be awesome

[username90]

A person who don't see the value in senior engineers who aren't team captains isn't a good team captain.