Why You Should Lose The Junior, Medior, Senior in Your Developer Job Title!

A story to make your life as a developer better!

Koen Verburg
2 min readMar 14, 2021
Photo by Peter Gombos on Unsplash

You’re reading this because Junior, Medior, or Senior is in your job title.

So what are you? Are you a Junior, Medior or Senior Developer?

Let’s start with some background information. From what I have seen, between 1–3 years experience is a Junior, between 3–5 years a Medior and it’s possible to be a Senior Developer from 5 or more years of experience. But this can vary from company to company, and whom you talk to, this is my view on those titles.

Here’s why those titles are worthless

Those levels can be limiting your abilities and it also puts you in a box. It doesn’t add value to the work you are doing.

Titles only set expectations for your Manager. Who can expect more from a Medior or Senior and expect less from a Junior when given a particular task.

It will also limit the responsibilities over a certain part of the project. For example, only Seniors may deploy to production, while Mediors may only deploy to the Development and Staging environments.

Although being a good proactive developer those responsibilities and more complex tasks can be given to you anyways, regards of the title you hold.

Focus on what you love to do and if that is programming, building programs, and applications. Hack some ideas together, It doesn’t matter what you are making.

Forget the titles, stay sharp on your skills and keep learning. Figure out what drives and motivates you and get good at it. That’s what matters!

When do you need titles?

Let go back to the titles for a bit, because sometimes you need them.

For instance, if you want to get more responsibilities or a higher pay check then it’s normal to go after a Medior or Senior role. This can be during performance interviews or when you are applying for a higher position at another company.

From my point of view, these situations are the only times where job titles matter.

Conclusion

Forget the titles, get good at what you do, and most importantly enjoy it, learn, and keep developing.

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Koen Verburg

Software Engineer based in Rotterdam — Photographer, Art Enthusiast, Dreamer, and thinker.