Spot on I reckon

+1 great answer!

IMHO this is not correct. Seniority is very much determined based on years of experience, but if there is a large discrepancy between the level of seniority and acutal expertise, that person will not be hired most likely.

@WorkingHard_Guy I've been interviewing developers and I agree fully with this answer. Of course there is such a thing as experience, but I've found the correlation to skill and maturity to be quite negligible after a couple of years experience. Some people stop developing at all after a few years. And to measure something complex as experience in a single scalar value of years? No way.

@Alex As I said, if a developer is not as experienced as the number of years he has worked in a field would suggest, he is less likely to be hired. But you can not call a central registry to tell them that he should be downgraded to a Junior developer.

@WorkingHard_Guy You said that seniority is very much determined based on years of experience. That's what I'm disagreeing with.

Not right. Technical skill isn't necessarily correlated with years of experience, but professional wisdom--knowing what to do & what not to do in what situation (even when canonical references might say otherwise) comes from experience. So a junior experience-wise may be an awesome developer but is usually a ticking time bomb ready to make a major blunder. No big deal if they have a junior position, but not good if they have senior-level responsibility. Which is why experience matters. You might get away with ignoring it for a while in your hiring process, but that doesn't make it a good idea.

And when the junior dev makes a major junior-level blunder, it's no big deal, everyone walks away from it, and they learn from it (hopefully), which is part of their road toward becoming senior and being ready to take on senior-level responsibility. Imagine giving someone fresh-out who is a technical whiz control of a multi-million dollar high-stakes project. They might succeed, but why take the risk? Extreme example, but it demonstrates my point. Having said that, if senior here means low risk if mistakes are made then go for it. But is that really senior then?

Agreed that years of experience are not a good measure of skill or expertise. However: "When I'm hiring, I [...] make a judgement on their skills [...and..] what potential I think they have to grow". Someone at a junior level of expertise with 20 years in the industry is unlikely to grow as fast as someone who can demonstrate seniority after a couple years on the job.

"if you don't know what level you're at, it's quite probable you're still at a junior level" - a lot of what makes a mid-level (especially) or a senior could just come naturally from being good at what you do, wanting to do your job well and wanting to help the company succeed. Why would someone need to be told which level they're at before they're ready to advance?

@WorkingHard_Guy You are confusing "experience" with "age." There are plenty of software developers with "10 years experience" who actually have one week of poor quality experience repeated 500 times.

@alephzero Look, that is not the point. Seniority is a function of time spent working in a certain field. We are talking about the meaning of words here. If we are talking qualifications, that is a different topic.

@BernhardBarker One reason is because usually advancement comes with responsibility. And responsibility means greater consequences to the mistakes that we all make at one time or another, but that usually take time and experience to learn not to make and/or to recover gracefully from. And experience is how the staff member demonstrates to managers that they're low risk. If you hire someone without experience and give them responsibility, you're taking a big chance on them. But if senior means title and pay but no responsibility, it's no big deal either way.

I realise seniority is highly subjective, and any given person may not even be 100% sure what it looks like for them, but can you elaborate a bit on roughly what you consider to be junior, mid-level and senior? Or is the answer intentionally vague about what it means to be a senior? If yes, how else would someone know they are a senior or at least which skills they should improve to become more senior? Clearly someone would need to tell the reader the answer at some point for them to know it, so why shouldn't the answer come from you?

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@WorkingHard_Guy Some people do 10 years 1 time, some people do 1 year 10 times. Years of experience are relevant, but not that much.

@AffableAmbler Absolutely. That's worked well in small companies (where if I interviewed someone excellent I could walk into the CEO's office and say "give me an extra £10k and we can have the excellent person") it gets a bit trickier in large companies where the bureaucracy has signed off on a specific role at a specific level and getting that changed is more difficult...