[giantg2]

I'm a slow dev when it's something new. My company only cares about speed. I'm still a midlevel dev after 10 years and probably always will be.

Just look for a non-tech company, but don't expect to get to a senior level or higher.

[pull_my_finger]

This seems a bit defeatist. Have you ever inquired what qualities you're missing that are expected from a senior level dev? Because it certainly seems like you'll get a different answer depending on who you ask "what is a senior dev?". With 10 years experience I have a hard time believing it's you, and not management gatekeeping pay based on low self-confidence/assertiveness.

[giantg2]

"This seems a bit defeatist. Have you ever inquired what qualities you're missing that are expected from a senior level dev?"

Speed. When facing lots of context switching and new stuff, I'm slower to implement because I want to have an in-depth understanding.

I filled the role of a senior dev and even a tech lead for one year each. It was a system that I became an expert in. Then they outsourced it and I had to start all over. I was pretty fast here since I knew it well. Mostly politics for why I didn't get promoted there.

On the next team I was on, I was told that they wanted more speed too. I think this was mostly that they didn't count points for security work, and that was what I did for close to 50% of my work. When I left for my current team, multiple tech leads and senior devs asked where I was going. They were shocked that it was a midlevel position and most said they thought I was already a senior dev.

Now I'm on a team with constant context switching and tech stack switching. I'm slow enough that they gave me a bad rating last year. So maybe I am a defeatist at this point. There's really no point in trying the same stuff when it's gotten me nowhere before.

[pull_my_finger]

Well fwiw software titles are bs. I really liked this article[1] where (among other things) they say:

> The primary skill of senior engineers is to train junior engineers. If you’re senior with no junior around, you’re not senior.

and

> Under that lens, the term “junior” just means “someone who has done less, and/or has less experience with, a specific task or tasks in a specific domain”, by contrast with “senior”. In other words, junior/senior is domain-dependent and team-dependent: we can be senior in one field (e.g. databases, containers), junior in another (e.g. frontend, machine learning). We can be senior relative to one team, and junior relative to another.

To suggest that you're not a senior developer because you take you're effected negatively by a lot of context switching is just blaming your manager's problems on you. Using a situational[2] senior position, you surely would meet the requirements. Note that neither of those deal with iteration speed or context switching, what a stupid metric.

Maybe you would do better in an actual senior role where you're doing more mentoring/overseeing rather than direct coding and bouncing around in tons of different code bases.

[1]: http://jpetazzo.github.io/2018/08/15/junior-senior-mentor/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situational_leadership_theory

[giantg2]

"Well fwiw software titles are bs."

Yes, but the pay difference is real.