And you are here why?

"Seniority" is a pretty loaded term, which depends on the organization one is in, and what that organization wants to get out of it. After all, at Alice’s Software Factory there might be a bajillion gradations involving all possible combinations of [ junior, senior, systems, lead, principal, etc. ] and [ developer, engineer, analyst, architect, wizard, etc. ]. And additional combinations too —  senior principal systems analyst  wouldn’t be out of the question. If you ignore the labels, there is a much more basic question at hand here, and that involves the people attached to the titles. To wit,  what allows people to climb up these ranks?  Mind you, this is more abstract than just straight up software engineering — it’s about pretty much any field, and how you differentiate “seniority” in that field. Me, I tend to break this up at a very high level into a few basic categories, viz.  Junior ,  Mid-Level , and  Senior . The difference? I’m glad yo...

Something that every  #CowboyDeveloper  needs to internalize, but, by definition, none ever will…

Actual quotes. And yes, each and every quote said with no trace of irony whatsoever. “ I don't need requirements, I know what I'm doing ” “ Look at all the code I wrote! ” “ I don’t see why I need to write tests for it — *I* wrote this, and it works. ” (also  ref ) “ Unit tests are a waste of time ” “ I don’t worry about code coverage — that’s what the QA group is for ” “ *I* understand the error message, and that’s good enough. After all, I’m the only one that can fix it. ” “ Nobody here is qualified enough to review my code ” “ I hand-tuned the code till it was reliable, we won’t need to worry about it any more ” ( also ref ) “If I didn’t derive it from first principles, it is received wisdom” (this one is a paraphrase) “ That won’t work because … ” (response to any new idea that he didn’t come up with) “ We don’t need vector clocks, we’ve got ntp ” “I don’t like functional programming, I prefer methods” “The only problem with my <system that I’v...