[silicon2401]

as someone heading towards 5 years developing, I'm not sure it's as straightforward as you think (and if it is, I'd love advice on how to improve). In my career so far my work has roughly gone in phases of backend, frontend, devops/infrastructure. I've been able to improve my soft skills of learning how different organizations work, learning how to network and collaborate, learning how to learn, etc, and improve my technical skills of development, learning about best practices, etc, based on the particular technologies I work with at a given time. But I haven't had the chance to just spend 5 years progressively leveling up my java backend or javascript frontend skills. As a result I don't think I would qualify for a senior developer level quite yet. But by that token, perhaps I'm also not the best person to say whether or not this is the typical path for a sr dev or not