Who are Senior, Middle and Junior? And why the hell do we need grades?
We collected comments from specialists from different companies and agencies. This is an extract from the third issue NEOCOPOP about grades. If you like to watch and listen, please go to YouTube.
All respondents were either developers themselves and reached the positions of CTO and CEO, or manage them.
Developers are divided into levels – juniors, middles, seniors. This gradation is not precise, has no boundaries and is based on a subjective judgment of a number of factors.
For example, number of years of work experience. You can start from the fact that a junior has two to five years of experience, a middle has two to five, and a senior has more than five.
Fundamental knowledge and skills in the field of frameworks and tools are also important.
Seniors can act as a leader or mentor and support the team.
A portfolio of projects is also important. The level of communication is important, especially for senior managers who work with customers.
Different companies will have different standards for classification, and this will vary from industry to industry.
The level of a developer is determined during an interview or during an assessment of his professional skills and knowledge.
This system has its drawbacks, but it allows both the developers themselves and employers to understand the level of specialists.
And allows you to move up the career ladder. It’s clearer where to go, it’s easier to build motivation and distribute tasks, responsibility within the team, it’s easier to hire, it’s easier to communicate and collaborate between teams.
Junes – these are younger, beginner guys. They are younger not because they are young or have little experience, but because their level of independence is quite low. And they are often treated condescendingly by more experienced colleagues. The motto of the Junes is: “Write what needs to be done, and I will try.”
Next come middles. This is the backbone of any organization. Workhorses, if you will. The motto of the middles is: “Give me a task and I will complete it.”
Then they go gentlemen. They are senior not because they are old, but because they often play the role of an older brother, a mentor for less experienced colleagues. Seniors are experts in their specialization at the company-wide level. Even team leads are not always experts in something.
Moreover, it often turns out that seniors are ready to remain in this position until the end of their careers, not wanting growth other than material ones. The motto of the seniors: “Show me a problem, and I will solve it.”
Why all this gradation? In my opinion, this is a good management tool where companies can explain to employees why one developer earns more than another.
And at the same time, it is a good tool to tickle the ego of developers, showing them that their title is quite high in the IT community.
June is a developer who has just started working. He won’t be able to properly develop the project’s architecture and confuses basic things, even in the SDK in which he works.
June minus – yesterday’s intern or student. He wrote something, tinkered with something somewhere, but so far he can only create a simple UI or, in the same way, pass some methods between classes, for example. This does not guarantee that everything will work.
June common – one of the most self-confident species. He believes that he has understood everything, that he can write complex architecture from scratch, that he is the coolest developer on the planet. What saves you from this is a slap in the face, either from older comrades, or from life. As a rule, in 99% of cases he comes to his senses and starts reading the documentation. As a rule, these are promising guys.
June plus — I realized that he was a jun after the previous sublevel.
He actively communicates with the community, asks stupid questions, tries to figure things out when problems arise, and asks mentors. Begins to understand the importance of documentation, online knowledge, etc.
Middle – a confident developer. Can advise, introduce something new.
Middles often stay in this grade for a long time because they know that they can always find a job, and they work calmly, without worrying about something global. They just like to program; they don’t want to grow up to become a senior, where they need to make a lot of serious, responsible decisions.
Signor – a hardened sailor. In his field, he is like a fish in water. He has a superficial knowledge of related areas, which allows him to be more flexible and make fairly serious decisions.
If his heart rate is too high, it will be impossible to communicate with him.
If the signor is cool and does not have an inflated CV, he will be a good dad to everyone. Or mom, which also happens.
I deliberately do not talk about management skills, because, for example, not every signor can be a leader. He may be a God in his field, but he will not have the skills to manage a team. He may have poor soft skills; he will not understand how to assemble and maintain a team.
Let’s get to the most interesting part – why is this division needed? Firstly, you will be able to keep your employee’s salary at market level and will not lose him.
Secondly, they help to properly assemble a team for a specific project so that it is efficient and financially optimal.
Thirdly, you will support the employee’s emergency situation. There is nothing wrong with that; feeling important is a good thing. You will allow him not to live with impostor syndrome, but at the same time you will not allow him to turn his nose up too much.
Fourthly, using the competency matrix and grading table, you can plan an individual development plan or individual growth for each developer.
In my opinion, this is a rather synthetic story. The main difference is the amount of responsibility that can be assigned to a person.
Junior – such a little kitten who is slightly blind, pokes around, does not know where to go, and it is difficult for him to fulfill his duties without guidance.
Middle is an independent unit that can be assigned complex tasks.
Signor – a person for whom guidance is no longer needed and is even harmful. He can guide and mentor employees himself.
Who needs this gradation and why?? It seems to me to fit employees into the system, rates, internal procedures. The functional area between these positions is quite blurred and greatly depends on the company.
Programmers are an engineering and production specialty. The allegory with the categories of mechanics and welders is not suitable. It is not enough to pass the standard and gain access to more complex tasks.
What is important to know? A specialist cannot assign a grade to himself. Even the most basic grade, June, must be assigned during the certification process. But there is no single certification system for the entire industry or a separate area.
Hence the second feature: grades for IT specialists are a very complex thing. Our company has four grades – junior, middle, middle+ and senior. Team leads and technical leads are not included in this gradation.
It happens that a programmer from another company comes to us, who had the status of senior, but according to our gradation he will be middle, not even middle+.
Measuring a grade based on the number of years of experience with a particular stack is also wrong. But, paradoxically, this criterion is the most revealing. From our practice, the transition from junior to middle occurs in no less than three years. Becoming a senior with less than five years of experience is almost impossible.
Well, they don’t give grades based on length of service? No. There is an individual development plan for testers, devops, programmers, and then there is certification and re-certification.
Junior it is enough to be able to perform well standard tasks within the framework of his working technology that are assigned to him. Their quality is monitored by a more experienced specialist on the team.
Middle has greater freedom in decision making. The quality of his code is no longer so closely monitored, and he still has no shame in turning to senior colleagues for help with complex problems.
Middle+ knows well not only his basic technology or the main framework, but also related technologies, libraries, frameworks, has a good outlook, knows in theory and knows how to apply patterns and best practices in practice. Most often, it is the middle and middle+ that help juniors become more experienced specialists.
Signor – an evolved version of middle+. He knows frameworks very well and has extensive experience working with complex problems with independent solutions. He has developed systems thinking and can build the architecture of an application or service. It can help to define tasks, just as managers decompose tasks, you can assess the risks yourself and choose a stack for the project.
Typically, grades, in addition to areas for practicing practical skills, indicate areas of soft skill growth – argumentation skills, planning ability, leadership qualities.
Why is all this necessary? This is going to be a shame for programmers, so get ready. A programmer is a resource for a manager. You can communicate well, play board games, go out and drink craft beer, but on a project, a programmer is a resource that allows you to implement the project, preferably on time.
Grades are needed at a minimum in order to estimate the volume based on the tasks and form a team. For example, to assemble an overkill landing page, involve a senior. It is not profitable. Giving a serious task to the middle carries the risk of failing the entire project in the future.
Second: this is important for the employee himself. Grades allow the programmer to understand career growth. He knows what will happen at the next level and can navigate what he needs to improve in order to improve himself.
In many companies, grades are linked to salaries. This is not a general practice or a rule.
To summarize, grades are needed both by the company itself and by programmers. The division into juniors, middles and seniors is a relative thing. It changes from company to company, depending on many factors, stacks, time and a lot of other things. But we don’t have a better way.
Grades are a useless thing that absolutely everyone needs.
Management needs to understand what salary you pay an employee now, what you will pay in a year, five, and so on.
An employee needs to understand where to grow in skills, money, and how to put it in a timely manner.
Grades within the company determine the path of the employee and his development necessary for this company, not the employee. Therefore, all the power of the grades remains within the company and, as soon as it enters the market, is broken by harsh reality. In my country a person can be a junior, but in another place he will be a senior, and vice versa.
For me, grades are a measure of my trust in an employee. I’ll give June a task, I’ll follow on his heels, I’ll give the middle a task and come to him on time, I’ll write to the signor about what I want regarding business.
In my opinion, this is a modern adaptation of the classic craft gradations – apprentice, journeyman and master.
The student is June. He can do tasks with supervision when they are well described. Step by step, do this and don’t do that, do this and don’t do that.
The journeyman is the middle. Can do tasks with a higher-level description. He understands what and how to do and how not to do it.
Signor can figure out what to do and what not to do, and tell others.
Why does the market need this? The employer, manager and employees themselves need this as a coordinate system.
To the employee: I am midi and cost this much. To the employer: this is a middle, it costs so much and can do such and such tasks. To the manager: this is the middle, he can do such tasks, but to do something inventive we need a sir.
Hiring managers receive budgets for juniors, middles, seniors and can make offers based on the system.
Firstly, it is worth saying that there is no official, approved and generally accepted distinction between them.
It can be said that junior has mainly theoretical knowledge and modest experience in its application. A person who has had very little involvement in commercial projects.
Jun can be trusted with simple tasks under the supervision of more experienced colleagues. We need to invest in his training so that he moves on to the next grade.
An important feature: it is useless to ask a junior to evaluate tasks, because everything he encounters he sees for the first time.
Middle – a more experienced employee who is able to solve problems of medium complexity. About tasks of high complexity, he will say that he does not know how many of them need to be completed, but he estimates tasks of medium and simple complexity quite accurately.
Signor – highest grade. A person who already thinks architecturally and is able to work on complex tasks and complete projects even alone.
Why is this classification even needed if there is no common standard? First of all, in IT it is used when hiring. It allows you to make a rough division of candidates. We understand that we need a person who has very high abilities and extensive experience, and we tell HR that we are looking for a signor. This cuts off a lot of resumes.
Internally, grades are used to ensure that the company and the employee understand progress and professional development. Naturally, his compensation depends on his grade.
To begin with, I will say that a developer is a profession where people, using analytical thinking, solve algorithmic problems using techniques, practices, and development tools.
Let me give you an example using schoolchildren. When a person comes to school, he is taught the basics of analytical thinking, saying that 2+2+2=6. This June. He is taught such analytical tasks.
The next stage: the student is given a tool – a multiplication table. Now 2*3=6. Here’s a tool for you, use it, and middle uses it.
The signor uses this kind of tools unconsciously, and this is already a skill.
Why is such a gradation needed at all? First of all, it is needed for positioning specialists. What experience and what level of problem solving can a specialist take on, what problems can he already solve, what problems is it too early for him.
It is extremely unfortunate to see a situation where seniors solve problems that a junior can solve. There is a common expression: cracking nuts with a microscope. It’s about the same thing.
Who does it help and how? Firstly, for technical architects and project managers – for the correct distribution of the flow of tasks.
And to the developers themselves. The junior understands how to get to the middle, he has a plan for the development of the theoretical and practical parts. This helps him determine the vector of movement and development.
Each company has its own internal gradation.
For us, I would characterize it like this: Junes — developers who should be assigned a mentor who checks all their code and helps them develop and grow to approximately the middle level.
Middles – independent developers, good specialists in their basic area, which does not require constant supervision. At this level, a specialist is not afraid to take on new languages, technologies, and frameworks and can master them fairly quickly.
Signor. In the modern world of remote work, soft skills are important to him, since he needs to work with juniors and develop them into middles. Naturally, any signor must have considerable experience in various technologies in order to select the right tools.
Who needs this gradation and why is it useful? One option is for managers. For example, a project begins. During the decomposition of the deadlines, it becomes clear that there should be four backend developers on the project. It is most logical to take one senior, two middles and one junior into the team. This will often be the most balanced team.
This is nothing more than a table of ranks.
June does the simplest job.
Middles They are already doing more independent work, but are still under the gun of their older comrades.
Seniors are more involved in innovative work.
It’s managing expectations. We expect a June to know the basics of programming languages and basic frameworks and to be able to write something.
We expect from the middle that he can write code, is able to make independent decisions, and has well-developed hard and soft skills.
From a senior we expect independence in choosing a framework, a way to solve problems and achieve a goal. As a rule, seniors are responsible for some part of their product or for the entire product.
This gradation was brought about by HR people, who at some point in time needed to find specialists for specific tasks.
On the other hand, within the company the division into juniors, middles and seniors serves as a compass in order to navigate which specialist to go to for which task.
Grade is a system for classifying employees. It allows you to determine the level of soft and hard skills, as well as show the employee’s growth points.
Today, variations of grades are increasingly common: middle+, junior+, middle-. These boundaries are arbitrary, because a senior in one company may barely reach the middle level in another.
Junior carries out tasks under the supervision of elders. We can say that this is not an independent combat unit.
Middle already does tasks on his own, may have a young Padawan under his command, but still he is looked after by more experienced developers.
Signor – a completely independent combat unit. He deals with complex, high-level problems.
Why is a grade needed? It helps to clearly define job requirements, provides transparent criteria for salary and bonuses, and allows you to establish a transparent promotion process.
Senior, middle and junior are a combination of hard and soft skills. Each company will have different measures for determining these indicators.
For me June – a person who has just entered IT or does not have enough time for self-study, or is a student. He definitely needs to tighten up his equipment. His actions need to be monitored. He should listen more than talk.
Middle – this is a tough guy who learned how to write code and now thinks about how his work affects end users. Junes can trust him. He has a lot of weight in the team and can influence processes within projects.
Signor – son of my mother’s friend. A person who can immediately dive into a problem and perhaps even solve it or offer solutions.
His wealth of knowledge and experience in commercial development allows him to quickly find bottlenecks not by bug reports, but by reading the problem itself.
You can trust him to mentor the middles, he helps them develop.
He can influence processes not only within the project, but also outside it and outside his department.
Who benefits from this breakdown? For developers – so that they understand their skills within the company. Managers – to understand who they are working with and how they need to work with developers, whether it is necessary to thoroughly explain each task or is it enough to give the technical specifications to the Company. And the company, so that it determines the strategy for hiring employees.
conclusions
But there won’t be any, because there are too few opinions for them.
Instead of conclusions, let’s highlight what is common in the comments:
measure of trust
understanding the problem,
ability to solve problems independently and at different levels,
experience,
skills,
hiring guideline,
salary guideline,
growth plan and guideline,
criteria for forming a project team.
Anything to add?
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