Uncover the Real Senior Developer with Tomasz Waraksa

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
Hey, everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted. We have a great show for you today, talking about who is a senior software developer and how to hire one. Joining the discussion today is Tomasz Waraksa. He's been a developer for over 25 years, writing industrial scale applications for companies like MasterCard and Citibank, and of course, regularly answering the question, who is a senior software developer?
Today's episode is sponsored by LinearB. Give your dev team the power to improve with team-based metrics, high-risk code alerts, and the world's first project board based on real-time get activity. Sign up free at linearb.io.
Tomasz, thanks for joining me today on Dev Interrupted.

**Tomasz Waraksa** (0:50)
Hi guys, it's great being with you here today. I'm very happy to be invited and I hope I can give you some insight into this highly controversial story that the article has been.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:02)
Yeah, yeah. I think it would make most sense for us to start by defining what is a senior software developer, what does it actually mean, and maybe what it doesn't mean.

**Tomasz Waraksa** (1:17)
Yeah, so obviously there is no objective measure to what a senior software developer is. It all depends on the context and on the specific work environment where you find yourself. As a good analogy, maybe funny, you remember that movie Idiocracy.
That says roughly how it can be. If you are between people who know very little, your seniority is determined entirely differently than when you are in an autonomous car development team at Tesla. So it really depends. And that's actually a very pragmatic answer because for me, a senior is someone who has mastered his domain above the level of majority of his team.
So that's probably the safest way for a manager to define how to find a senior developer. He has to quantify the average level of knowledge on his team and seek somebody who is above that average.
That's probably the safest metric that I can think of. Now, when I say this, it becomes obvious that in many cases, the manager would come to a conclusion that he doesn't need a senior because you don't want everybody to be at that high end of the spectrum. You need a team which is properly varied and has people with all levels of skills to fill in all the niches and gaps in your development process. Very often, we just need someone who is good at React and OGS, or somebody who is proficient in TypeScript and ASPNET, somebody who will adapt well to the team, understand the project, pick up the tasks from the board, implement them soundly, efficiently, but that's not a senior developer. This is just a good developer. It's something that you would simply expect from people because that's what you pay them for. So I believe that when you're looking for a senior developer, you're measuring well above that level. Unfortunately, it seems to me that companies very often advertise for senior developers because they hope that they will somehow filter out the noise and get people who are not imposters, who are really not pretending to know things that are really beyond their reach. So that's probably a reason why pretty much 90% of advertisement for jobs is for seniors, while reality is that on a team, there is a few seniors. That's how it always goes.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:55)
Right.
A common job description for a senior developer that I've seen is you need to have 10 to 15 years of experience, I see that in most senior developer job descriptions. And even, I've hired for this role, senior developer, that HR team would come to me and say the first thing, well, how many years of experience do they need to have? That's the first thing they ask me. How do you feel about years of experience as it relates to senior software developers?

**Tomasz Waraksa** (4:30)
Obviously you need years of experience because you won't achieve your level of seniority overnight. It takes time and efforts to collect this knowledge, process it and make sense of it. But let's be honest, somebody can be a lazy bum for 10 years long and by some sheer luck, just navigate through corporate realities and get away with it. So ultimately years of experience are needed, but they are in no way a indicator of being a senior developer.
So I would never put this as a sole indicator of you being a senior.

**SPEAKER_2** (5:10)
Yeah, you know, I wanted to ask you because when I've interviewed senior developers, people that are interviewing for a senior developer role, they may consider themselves a senior developer, but they don't know the particular technology or programming language that I was looking for. So, you know, for example, I'm hiring, I want a senior developer that knows Angular, you know, framework.