Career progression - software development.

SideWinder · 12 Sep 2010 at 21:38

I need a bit of help with understanding the career progression in software development.

My partner is starting a job in recruitment and she needs to understand the different levels within software development and what exactly their roles include.

She has been provided with:

Junior Developer
Developer
Senior Developer
Team Leader
Development Manager
Head of Development.

But she is having problems with understanding what each of their roles are.

What is the difference between Junior and Developer for instance? Just experience? Obviously this is the chain of command but just wondering if anyone who is working in this career should shed a bit of light.

Thanks in advance.

NiCkNaMe · 12 Sep 2010 at 21:43

With the greatest of respect - this is what annoys me about the recruitment profession. How can someone with little idea of what a profession entails, successfully recruit for a role within it?

May explain why we had over 800 applicants and approximately 30 unsuccessful interviews in a recent role we interviewed for.

MickeyFinns · 12 Sep 2010 at 21:46

I'm about to go from Junior to Developer. Junior is basically the first year and the difference, from my experience, is being given work units without specific deadlines to get to grips with any technologies you're unfamiliar with.

Hate · 12 Sep 2010 at 21:50

In my opinion / experience the more senior a developer the more difficult / key your work to the project is. Example from where I've been before is the junior developers would be mucking about with strings and the senior developers would be writing thread management stuff.

Izi · 12 Sep 2010 at 21:55

NiCkNaMe said:
With the greatest of respect - this is what annoys me about the recruitment profession. How can someone with little idea of what a profession entails, successfully recruit for a role within it?

May explain why we had over 800 applicants and approximately 30 unsuccessful interviews in a recent role we interviewed for.

does my head in. we get about 5 calls a day from 'professional IT .net recruitment agents' which don't know their bum from their elbow.

EDIT: realised I was of no help

Junior: Little or >1 year industry experience
Intermediate 1-5 years industry experience
Senior > 5 years industry experience

Note: Industry experience is important.

Head of development/Development manager can mean different things, as Vai said below.

SideWinder · 12 Sep 2010 at 22:00

NiCkNaMe said:
With the greatest of respect - this is what annoys me about the recruitment profession. How can someone with little idea of what a profession entails, successfully recruit for a role within it?

May explain why we had over 800 applicants and approximately 30 unsuccessful interviews in a recent role we interviewed for.

Izi said:
does my head in. we get about 5 calls a day from 'professional IT .net recruitment agents' which don't know their bum from their elbow.

All valid points - especially as it is non-IT individuals who are recruiting for IT. But those who do know a lot about C# or whatever, why would they want to be in recruitment when they could be in a job they want to do...as in, working in a software development role.

//edit and the company my partner is working for are currently training her. This means around a couple of weeks of intense training about what software development is, understanding the roles and the sector. They're not 'let losoe' with no training...i don't know, doesn't change the fact recruitment companies are sometimes annoying.

So, someone has to do it i guess.

Thanks for the comments so far, really helpful already.

Vai · 12 Sep 2010 at 22:05

That may be the chain of command but there are two different careers in that list.
The first three are based on technical ability, the last three are management (unless Team Leader = Tech Lead / Lead Programmer).

The first three would depend on experience, responsibilities and technical proficiency.

SideWinder · 12 Sep 2010 at 22:14

Should have asked you directly Vai.

Anymore information on this topic?

Izi - great, thanks!

Haircut · 12 Sep 2010 at 22:19

As already said that list has developers and managers it in, it's not necessarily a career progression.
Is she going to be concentrating on permanent recruitment rather than contract?

As for your girlfriend, although she doesn't have to understand how to be a developer she really should make an effort to understand the technologies involved.
As a contractor I deal quite a bit with recruiters and the ones that just do keyword matching on things I have on my CV are the ones that get no time from me.

I have on my CV that I've used SVN and I had one recruiter tell me that I may not be suitable for a particular job as they wanted someone with experience in Subversion.
Now, while a recruiter shouldn't need to understand how to use it they should be aware of the fact that SVN is short for Subversion.

Similarly she should be aware of the differences between what things like SQL and PL/SQL are, that C is not the same as C# and VBA is not VB.NET.

If she can get things like that she'll be doing better than a lot of recruiters out there and people like me will have a lot more time for her when she calls up.

scorza · 12 Sep 2010 at 22:20

Junior developer is just someone who doesn't have experience e.g. a graduate. Senior developer may have technical responsibility for an element of the system being developed, and lead other developers working on that element. In my experience a lot of developers don't want to go down the software development management path, they'd prefer to remain technical so the next step after Senior Developer would be some sort of Technical Architect/Design Authority role.

No idea what Head of Development role is, I've never heard of one - next step up from a Development Manager would normally be Project Manager.

radderfire · 12 Sep 2010 at 22:20

Here are my opinions:

Junior Developer - I'm just out of college or Uni and this is the first time I've ever been paid to code.

Developer - I made it through the first one or two years and managed to get kept on so I now have a promotion.

Senior Developer - I'm actually pretty good at programming and pretty key to the organisation so they give me a good job title and pay me quite a lot.

Team Leader - I understand coding but what's special about me is I don't mind helping other people to code and I can actually communicate with them and enthuse them.

Development Manager - I can take responsibility for key technologies and co-ordinate effort on them. I'm pretty good on the tech side and I can manage the project and deliver on it too.

Head of Development - I'm a very good coder who has now moved into a managerial / project management role. I have the intelligence to code but now have an overseeing / strategy role and leave it to the talented team that I have put together.

Rgds

Stretch · 12 Sep 2010 at 22:48

NiCkNaMe said:
With the greatest of respect - this is what annoys me about the recruitment profession. How can someone with little idea of what a profession entails, successfully recruit for a role within it?

May explain why we had over 800 applicants and approximately 30 unsuccessful interviews in a recent role we interviewed for.

+ 1.

Some of the phone calls I've had with agents have left me in stitches.