The simplest metric I can think of to qualify someone as a senior developer is whether they are capable of working directly with users, asking the right questions, and making the right architectural decisions based on that information. They might also need to break down the work so that other junior developers can contribute. Answer from circumeo on reddit.com
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5186 Senior Full Stack Web Developer/Engineer - Job Descriptions - Human Resources - Missouri State
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reddit.com › r/learnprogramming › what skills a senior fullstack developer need?
r/learnprogramming on Reddit: What skills a senior fullstack developer need?
February 16, 2024 -

Hi all, Im from Colombia, english isn't my native language so sorry in advance.

I have one year studying and practicing code, I even have 2 projects as a freelance in web design, but I'm wondering what skills do i need to be a good dev or even senior, apart from experience (this come with the time itself), what softskills and hardskills should i start building?

thank you all for your time.

Top answer
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First and foremost - "senior fullstack developer" isn't really a thing. At senior level people specialize. You will have senior frontend developers, senior DevOps engineers, senior backend developers, senior UX designers etc. We still can perform other roles to some degree but this is just some cream on top. For instance - I am a senior backend developer. I can do CSS, I can do some React - enough to mantain an internal company CRM for instance, I can do some DevOpsy things too. But I can't do an up to date modern front-end application that will work on every imaginable device, I don't follow the latest trends and packages that Javascript ecosystem offers, I won't be able to write you an application that loads in 2 seconds flat and has to operate with 50 different roadblocks and different paths users may choose. I will be able to navigate an existing kubernetes cluster, set up a Dockerfile, scale pods I need to required amounts, update Dockerfile dependencies and maybe even write some rules for autoscaling. But I will not be able to develop a whole CI/CD pipeline, make a decision on whether to use Github actions vs deploy our own EC2 instance, deploy AWS roles in a safe minimum privilege fashion, set up S3 bucket so it autoscans specific files with a specific script and tags them accordingly etc. Those are all heavily specialized skillsets and pursuing just one is a full time adventure. You can be a master of one while retaining some understanding of other fields but you certainly won't be a master of many. And companies looking for seniors tend to look for experts in their respective domains. Hence a "senior fullstack" is a bit of an oxymoron. I know these job postings exist but they tend to be posted by smaller companies that try to get one person salary to do work of three. For back-end web development senior level requires several things: first - experience. You have tried a lot of different things, you have made some mistakes that costed company thousands to hundreds of thousand USD (it's a matter of when, not if), you have refactored and changed big pieces of your codebase many times after realizing previous approach actually sucked. second - expert level knowledge in your domain. I don't expect a junior to walk me through specifics of their framework or language of choice. I do expect that if for instance I interview someone for senior Ruby on Rails backend position then they will be able to go really low level - start talking about limitations of Ruby's multithreading, easily spot various classes of errors (anything from O(n+1), using invalid tools for the job, can something be null, considering edge cases etc). There comes a point when you start understanding and modifying core codebase of a framework/library you work with to handle specific edgecases. third - you are easy to collab with. When a junior makes a pull request that's 200 lines of code I can probably leave 10 comments. When a senior makes a pull request we might have different opinions on something (and we still make mistakes!) but I can follow your code structure, I won't have any major complaints about architectural patterns you have decided to use, your variable names will be sane, you will have a right set of tests etc. Differences and comments tend to be down to matter of tastes, not to "will this even work...?". fourth - you are good at explaining things and navigating business landscape. Soft skills are vital in this job. You will be talking to people who don't know what a variable even is. Especially at senior level you work with PMs directly (and with juniors below you). You will be given tasks that are impossible/insane and it's your job to either make impossible possible or provide a "good enough" alternative that will be fine with whoever needs this feature. At this stage tickets you are getting are not "vetted" as much and it's onto you to spot potential issues with any and relay them to according parties. fifth - you keep up with the trends - we can have a talk on upcoming new features in an ecosystem we are working with, provide multiple solutions/alternatives to the problem we are having, know which tech sounds useful and which is probably not for us. sixth - you worked with many people over many projects. This might be counted under "experience" but it's not exactly the same thing. See, there are people who have done 1 year of experience repeated 5 times over. They get stuck forever at beginner/intermediate levels despite thinking they are near senior level. Then we organize a technical interview and they fail hard unable to spot issues or communicate them properly. And they fail their interview. There's no specific list of skills however. Since hardskill list updates every year to some extent for one. For juniors interview process in my experience at least is fairly linear - we give them specific programming tasks and they give us answers while we fish for some keywords. For seniors we have a much more open debate. We may ask what's your preferred style of testing, present you with some fully working code and ask for your opinion, ask about some features you are particularly proud of and if there's something you very much are NOT proud of etc. There still are technical questions (and they are way harder than ones you would ask at a lower level) but it's also a lot more open ended.
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The simplest metric I can think of to qualify someone as a senior developer is whether they are capable of working directly with users, asking the right questions, and making the right architectural decisions based on that information. They might also need to break down the work so that other junior developers can contribute.
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What skills a senior fullstack developer need?
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February 16, 2024
I would like to ask about full stack senior dev.
I did a slightly more complicated version of this in 3 months, but in my free time doing like 2-5 hours per week. This can easily be done in 1 month if they're working full time. More on reddit.com
🌐 r/cscareerquestions
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March 10, 2025
Controversial: Do you belive senior full stack Exist? Is it not just Backend Specilist who can do frontend at medium-high level or vice versa?
Titles are subjective but there's more to senior than being tied to a specific tech stack. More on reddit.com
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10
0
January 16, 2025
As a senior full stack web developer, I want to switch career and learn game development
i mean you have money right? just go for it. The industry is prob one of the most saturated in the world so it will depend alot on how you handle it, its business in the end. More on reddit.com
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March 20, 2025
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