In the past Codemotion 2017 I attended a presentation by Luis G. Valle where he invited us to reflect on what it means to be a senior. There are senior programmers in all companies, but not all of them understand in the same way what this distinction means.
Today the industry accepts some factors as valid for listing someone as a senior:
- The title on Linkedin. The self-proclaimed in his curriculum or that has in his experience a stage in that position (even if he accepted at the time a job offer that said "Senior programmers with at least 1 year of experience for an important company in the sector are wanted") is accepted as such just because he has it in his Linkedin.
- Be more expensive. The kilo of programmer meat is more expensive if the meat is senior and not junior and curiously in the type of company that only resells programmers are all senior...
- Writing code that no one understands. Some people consider themselves senior programmers for writing code that only they understand, and then brag about it.
- Years of experience. Having many years of experience is also reason enough in the industry to classify a programmer as a senior.
To illustrate what Luis considers to be senior, which of course is not all of the above, he gave us the case of doctor Ignaz Semmelweis as an example:
He was born in 1818 in Budapest and received his doctorate in obstetrics in 1840, beginning his practice as an assistant at the hospital in Vienna where his duties as a junior physician were to examine patients, supervise deliveries, prepare for doctor's visits, teach other students, and maintain records and clinical histories.
In the 19th century, free hospitals were established all over Europe, where the women who were treated there accepted to be studied, which made it very attractive for the poorest women of that time. The hospital in Vienna was organized in two maternity sections.
A first clinic with doctors and students (where Semellweis worked) and another with midwives and their students. Semellweis started working and observed something curious: in the first clinic 33% of the women died, while in the second clinic the mortality rate was 4%. This was known even by the patients, since admission was on alternate days in each clinic and the women who had to give birth in the first clinic begged on their knees not to do so; they even preferred to give birth on the street, since the mortality rate was lower than in the hospital.
Semellweis decided to get to the bottom of it. He collected data and files from the hospital, analyzed them, made statistical tables and began a process of eliminating possible causes. The two clinics used the same overcrowding, the same procedures and the same instruments. He weighed factors such as temperature, air pressure and even the presence of males, but had to rule out all of them. The only solution could be in people, so his theory was that women who were treated by doctors and students got sicker, which turned the community against him. But a coincidence occurred and that is that a doctor friend of his teaching his students how to perform an autopsy, cut himself with a scalpel with which they performed dissections and a few days later he died. When they examined the body, they found that he had the same fevers as the women who gave birth in the clinic.
In those days it was common for doctors and medical students to deliver babies after performing autopsies in the cadaver room.
Semellweis published his findings and asked for toilets to be installed in the first clinic so that women could wash their hands before attending, but his request was rejected, as it clashed with the prejudices of the clinical society of the time and he was expelled from the hospital. It was not until 20 years later, with Louis Pasteur's studies on microbes, that it was finally understood what was going on and toilets were installed in hospitals all over the world.
Semellweis, despite being younger and having less technical knowledge, presented a more mature and committed attitude to his work. He was not afraid to confront the society of the time and raise his voice, providing data to support his claims and questioning the processes around him. Semellweis was more senior than the rest of the doctors.
A fantastic example, no doubt.
In the end, senior means maturity. What is expected of a senior programmer is to have a mature attitude and way of working, because one day you don't go to bed as a Junior and the next day you wake up as a Senior. He is not the one who knows the most, but the one who has understood that no matter how much you know, there is always someone who knows more than you do. But they don't have a problem with that either, because the important thing is to add value to your company, influencing the organization in the field of technology and improving the processes and people around them.
Finally, Luis in his talk, considers four basic principles in a senior programmer:
- Reliable. It must be someone that the rest can trust, for example, if you have an assignment for Friday, that day it will be completed and if for some reason it cannot be, several days before you will have informed so that you can plan ahead.
- Responsible. We all make mistakes and what shows maturity is recognizing it, the important thing is how to face them and learn from them. You have to be responsible in all areas, do not wait until something breaks to fix it, but act proactively. We have to think that we contribute in a greater or lesser degree to the decisions of our company and therefore be responsible for them.
- Flexible. You should not link your career to a single tool, keeping your knowledge up to date and adapting to technical needs.
- Pragmatic. No software is perfect and you don't just have to write code. You have to know the target destination, your own skills, the tools, the context and use all this to make the best possible product. You have to find the balance between perfection and productivity. It's important to write quality code, but also to deliver jobs on time.
- Influential in your organization. All good programmers are, in part by listening and learning from their peers, setting an example with their attitude, teaching others and helping them grow, and questioning processes by providing data and presenting solutions, in short, improving your company's culture.
What do you think? Do you consider yourself a senior in your work?
