The advanced version of a junior developer is the senior developer which needs a huge background and the ability to lead and to deal with complexity.
Three to five years after being a junior you should be able to become a senior.
There are lots of important skills you need when you want to become a senior developer.
At first, you have to lead and to coach other software developers to improve their skills.
Also you have the responsibility of a group of people which means that you need to work hard to get acceptable results.
It’s essential that you have the ability to abstract and to keep the survey of a project and you have to find solutions in larger context.
To be a communication hub is necessary which means that you could explain things according to different backgrounds.
In the end you also need social skills to communicate with other people like the project management or the customers.
It’s fundamental that you know how to do large scale design, also architectural patterns.
Furthermore you need a huge level of process knowledge so you could find improvements and optimize processes. You are the person who keeps a project running.
Finally, I guess, senior developer seems to be a role model for junior developers.
(Tim)
