What is a senior programmer?

If you are a worker or student in the programming industry I'm sure you've heard of the concept: senior programmer. In this article we are going to tell you what a Senior programmer is, what their role is in a technology company and how you can become one.

If you are a worker or student in the programming sector, you have surely heard of the concept: senior programmer. In this article we are going to tell you what a Senior programmer is, what their role is in a technology company and how you can become one.

In every workplace there is a hierarchy to measure the skills, experience and training of workers, and with that basis, offer much more competitive salaries. In the world of programming, the senior category is used to refer to a developer with extensive experience in the technology sector.

However, talking about the Senior category in the world of software development is highly complex, because the sector is constantly evolving, experience in the sector is measured in a different sense, beyond mastering a single programming language for example. , the Senior category requires other qualities.

To designate what type of candidate obtains the Senior terminology, we must resort to both university training and work experience, in this case the years behind being extremely important, but nevertheless, a Senior programmer can also be self-taught with a few years of experience . Experience in the sector.

Due to the complexity of quantitatively designating the degree of education and years of experience that a programmer needs to become a senior, there are two fundamental categories to evaluate the programmer, which are the following:

This quality does not change, in any work structure to climb, extensive experience is necessary. However, in web development, it doesn't necessarily have to do with years of work.

In this case, the experience is seen in mastering different technologies, having participated in projects from scratch and constantly evolving in the workplace.

It is important to understand that although there is no regulation regarding the years of experience of a programmer to become a senior, it does not mean that after a few weeks you can already occupy that place.

The programming sector is a job in which a lot of order is needed. Maybe at first glance a software works in a similar way on the surface, but if you are a developer, you know that good work shows at a code level.

A Senior programmer has knowledge of agile methodologies, software architecture, object-oriented programming, design patterns and functional programming. All of these tools help create much cleaner and easier to optimize code.

Now that we know that experience is extremely important, we must think about how we can acquire it, and above all how we can make it verifiable.

Many web programmers work for nascent startups because these are the innovative centers of technology, some others choose to enter much more consolidated companies or consultancies, but perhaps, you will acquire the greatest experience working in a startup.

The important thing about experience for a programmer is to work in various stages of development and not just have a position with little demand and low productivity. Also, you can gain experience moving in different areas of work, in this way you will be able to use different tools than if you worked in a single work center, where you would only use the software that is usually used in the company.

Remember that you can also gain experience as an independent or self-taught developer. You can always expand your knowledge through free software, accessing open codes and entering collaborative projects.

You should not rule out choosing to create your own project, since this way you will face challenges that you would never be able to experience otherwise. In this personal project you can venture into new programming languages ​​such as Kotlin, Dart or Scala, perhaps the future of programming lies in these software.

Without a doubt, a senior developer has a number of very important skills that help them solve problems on a daily basis. As a developer, he masters the syntax of programming languages, understanding what is the most efficient way to use them and in which situations one language or another should be used.

A very important characteristic to become a Senior developer is knowing the basic programming structures, which will allow you to master the syntax of the languages ​​and be able to adapt pseudocode to any programming language. Taking this into account, you will be able to move from one code to another, because you will know the basic structure of all languages.

Let's not rule out the importance of mastering three or four programming languages, you can master a general one such as Java, C or PHP, a scripting language such as Python, understand the use of JavaScript, and in addition some of the languages we mentioned above.

Knowing several languages ​​​​used in different circumstances will allow you to have a very important set of tools to design any type of software.

Other skills that you should strengthen if you want to become a programmer are:

Now that you know what a Senior programmer is, what are the basic skills you should have and how you can gain experience, what follows is to be patient and focus in the coming years on building these skills.