The Unwritten Rules to Becoming a Senior Developer: 4 Steps to Level Up

The article says the move from mid-level to senior has no universal checklist, but several habits shorten the path: get better at coding, think beyond yourself, investigate critical incidents, and write more to scale knowledge. It also warns that title chasing alone does not guarantee promotion or satisfaction.

Reading notes

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• The jump from junior to mid-level is described as relatively small, while the move from mid-level to senior is less clear and varies by company.
• A common mistake is to focus on becoming an expert in a language, adding tools, or obsessing over perfect code instead of thinking about promotion signals.
• To improve coding, the article recommends writing bad code, reading good code, learning design patterns, and studying framework-specific patterns.
• Senior developers are described as people who create shared patterns, consolidate duplicate approaches, and make the codebase more cohesive.
• The article frames software work as a team sport and says a healthy codebase has a similar style across authors.
• When outages or critical bugs happen, the advice is to raise your hand, investigate, update the team in plain language, and ask for help when needed.
• Writing is presented as a major part of senior work, including documentation, emails, tickets, code comments, pull request descriptions, articles, and posts.
• Writing clearly is treated as a way to scale knowledge and explain technical ideas to people outside the team.
• The article notes that you can do all of these things and still not get promoted if there is no budget or no opening.
• It closes by saying senior may be the longest-lasting title in a developer career and should not be chased only for status or money.