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The Downsides of Being a Senior Developer

Is being a senior developer even worth it?

Daan
Level Up Coding
Published in
4 min readOct 19, 2020

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Reaching the level of a senior developer is something a lot of developers try to achieve in their careers. Mostly less experienced developers often try to climb the corporate ladder as quickly as possible — where the end goal is becoming a senior developer.

Being a senior developer might seem tempting at first sight, especially from a less experienced developer’s point of view. Their primary (and often only) task is to write code. They look at a senior developer as someone who’s a great coder, which is what they want to become as well.

But being a senior developer comes with much more than just being a great coder. In fact, there are some downsides to being a senior developer. Once you reach the level of senior developer you might sometimes even wonder if being a senior developer is even worth it.

Your opinion matters

As a senior developer your opinion matters. And it matters a lot. This means you’ll be spending a lot of your time explaining how you think about certain topics to a lot of different people — varying from your manager, to the rest of your team and if you’re really unlucky you’ll find yourself in a meeting with that guy from the marketing department on a topic that you’re not interested in.

If you’re not aware of this, chances are you’ll find yourself attending meetings the entire day. It’s important for a senior developer to recognize the fact that other people value your opinion and you should act accordingly. Try to schedule as few meetings as possible, because they are a real productivity killer that stops you from doing your actual job.

It’s inevitable that the time you’ll spend on meetings is going to increase once you reach the level of a senior developer. Although most developers don’t like attending meetings all day long, it’s something that you’ll have to be willing to do from time to time.

Doing tasks other developers don’t know how to do

The skill level of the developers can vary a lot within a team. Some developers within the team might have years of experience while others are just starting to work their first…

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