from Hacker News

Ask HN: What separates a senior developer from an intermediate developer?

by daryllxd on 2/15/18, 9:25 PM with 1 comments

Yup what it says. I feel like I'm somewhere in the middle. I've led a software project before but there were just 3 developers in our team and I had the most experience. I also review their code while doing coding myself. For senior devs, how'd you get there from an intermediate level? I just want to get better.

I code primarily in Ruby/Javascript, currently learning Elixir if that helps.

by taylodl on 2/15/18, 10:02 PM
It's not about technology, it's about people. It's the realization that your job is to deliver value to someone, and then figure out how to (politely) get through your organization's red tape (and every organization has it) to get it done.
Coming back to technology - it's about simplicity. It's the realization your system is going to spend most of its life in operations and maintenance and you need to design systems that just work, work reliably, and when they inevitably have problems they're easy to diagnose and fix.
It's these skills that will take you to another level.