Does a team need Senior Dev?

When I started my career with a new company, everyone and everything were seemed to be weird. I was not aware of the technologies they were using. And they suddenly asked me to join a team, where everyone seemed to be a professional coder. I was like, wait what I’m doing here?

And then they gave me the product walk through and they gave me a responsibility to build a feature. Yes, I struggled a lot because the technology was new and somehow, I completed the feature but yea since it was my first feature I did some bad coding. However, I improved that in the next release.

But seniors in the team helped me so much to deliver this feature at the right time. They supported me and they thought me a lot. And the main thing to note here is, they didn’t come and type the code in my machine to complete the feature, they just provide me hints to solve the respective problem.

As the time went by, seniors became friends and we had a fun filled product development going on. And Yes, seniors are very much important to a team.

You cannot replace Senior with Junior

In this IT sector, there’s a saying like, you can replace a senior guy with two junior guys. That’s never going to succeed. You can think about replacing a senior guy with another senior person, but you cannot replace him with juniors. Senior have their own experience in this IT sector. They know how to handle things and also how to support and enhance the people growth.

Juniors are like freshers, they indeed need some support from the seniors. Let’s imagine, when I joined this company, I’m replacing a senior in that respective team. His daily activities will be assigned to me and definitely I’ll be not able to do the same things as the senior guy.

You can manage with juniors but still the lion is the king of the forest.

Learn things with Seniors

If you’re a lucky one, you’ll get some awesome seniors. During my days, two of my seniors they keep exploring about new technologies, best practices of coding etc., The best part is that, they will be sharing these thoughts with us, which made us to gain interest to learn some new technologies.

Have good contact with these kinds of seniors, which will be very helpful to increase your knowledge as well as you’ll get some technology exposure.

Don’t expect too much from Seniors

When you face some difficult situations during your development time, don’t expect seniors to touch your keyboard and write the program for your respective task. Remember

Anyone can guide you, but only you should learn

When you face these kinds of situations, just go an talk to your seniors, explain the problem. Most of the times they’ll only give you a hint to solve that problem. They know the solution but to make us research, these hints would be really helpful.

If you want to complete the feature, you should face all the problems and only you should solve that problems to build a complete feature. But remember seniors are always there to support you.

Conclusion

A team should consist of senior and junior people. And also, a small note to everyone, two or three freshers cannot do one experienced engineer’s job. Seniors should be a part of the respective team where Juniors can learn from them.

A team without Senior would be world without Microsoft.

Think about it!

Happy Coding!

Cheers! 😉