Answer: It all depends on the man.
Take your circle of friends and colleagues as an example. Some of them are senior developers at 25. Some of them are junior at the age of 40. It all depends on the man.
There is no fixed law of seniority. On average, men become senior developers as they get into their early 30-es. Once they get more experience and knowledge. But that’s not always the case. It all depends on the man.
Being a senior developer means respect – no matter your years.
Being a senior developer means more opportunities to advance your career.
Being a senior developer means wealth.
We all begin at junior positions. When you are just starting out, there are mentors who take care of you. They make sure you learn the basics you need to know to make that initial progress. That initial big step forward.
But, as we move a bit further into our careers, we stop learning. The one thing that most developers stop doing is learning more about software development good practices:
- Design patterns
- Unit and other types of testing
- Refactoring and how to clean up your code.
Too many people only think about today. Copy/paste the solution from Stack Overflow, and you are done. Don’t think too much about it. There is always tomorrow, where all that learning will happen.
If you don’t take care of your code, it won’t take care of you. The copy/paste programming only fixes the short-term issues. Eventually, the code will become too large and too scary to maintain.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
By learning and applying some basics techniques of cleaning up the code, the code will be easier to maintain.
Continuously cleaning up your code is an intelligent way of programming. It is the only way.
By applying techniques you have learned, your code evolves.
You evolve.
And your role and importance in the team evolve.