Signs that you're becoming a Senior Software Engineer

Photo by Beth Macdonald on Unsplash

You're asked to review and merge pull requests

Half your day will be writing comments in PRs.

Sometimes you get a call from someone to clarify a comment, it becomes a 45-minute session where you open 12 Chrome Tabs, MS Paint and start drawing boxes and arrows.

You're spending more time in meetings than programming

The other half of your day will be participating in meetings. Sometimes you wonder if it's even necessary that you're there. Then a PM has an idea for a new feature, and you're glad you were there to advise them about it before they ignored you.

You're bald

Your body has decided to drop your hair to keep your brain cooled to do all the processing it has to do on a daily basis. You've received a letter from the world's bald association asking you to join their monthly meetings.

You're asked for your opinion when the team is making design decisions

You spend years learning and working hard to become someone who other people look up to. Now you are that person. It means more meetings.

You get called in the middle of the day randomly to give your input or answer questions no one else knows

They say "It will be 2 minutes" in their message. It becomes a 30-min call.

You're writing more documentation than coding

There was a time when you didn't even think where those docs came from. They were there from the beginning. You never stopped to think who wrote that. Now it's on you.

You realize that no one teaches you how to write docs. Docs are one of the most important aspects of great codebases. Yet nobody really teaches you or prepares you to write good docs.

You still feel like a newbie

Your feeling of knowledge oscillates between "I know everything" and "I don't know shit"

You're asked to do presentations

Sometimes you think using Comic Sans is fun because it pisses off the designers.

You have a stash of memes from the internet to add to your presentations. You only do the presentation to show the memes.

You realize coding skills are not everything

Helping other teammates, devs or not. Sharing what you know. Trying to create a good environment for everyone to work in. Being a good person. Those things are more important than knowing how to implement an A* Algorithm

I'm sure I'm missing a lot of things. If you can come up with one please share in the comments

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