Programmers Ranks

After discussing the differences between programmer ranks this week with a more junior co-worker, I thought this would make a good post as it seems to be something that is not spoken about much.  This I think is not very helpful for junior programmers looking to develop themselves.  Generally there are roughly three ranks of programmers: junior (beginner), programmer (intermediate), senior (advanced) and then lead programmer (advanced plus people skills).  Some companies use different names for these ranks or have a few more specialised ranks e.g, Co-Op or student programmers but so far I’ve generally found the ranks to be somewhat similar in terms of what is expected.

Junior Programmer

The junior programmer is the lowest rank in the programmer family, most programming team’s populations usually consist of about 25% junior programmers.  This is where everyone starts out in the industry.  Junior programmers are primarily implementers of other peoples designs and are usually heavily supervised by more senior team members.  It is usual for programmers to remain at the junior rank for a few development cycles as they mature and gain experience.

Programmer

The rank of programmer is the middle rank of the programmer family, most teams usually consist of about 50% programmers and as such this is usually the most commonly encountered rank of programmer.  Programmers are veterans of the development process and are expected to be able to design and implement features given a feature brief, some contacts, some supervision and peer (or senior) review of their designs.  They are also expected to be the first line of support for junior programmers, helping with problems the juniors cannot solve.

Senior Programmer

Senior programmer is effectively the highest rank for a programmer, as a lead programmer is really a specialised senior programmer.  Senior programmers usually make up about 25% of a development team, this is mostly due to a few factors: they are rare (every team wants them and they take a long time to develop), cost (this amount of talent is not cheap) and individual preferences (they cannot be easily forced to do something they don’t want to do).  Senior programmers are veterans of many many development cycles and as such have experience of just about every type of project, working environment and methodology.  This depth of experience is their strength: they typically have a few more junior programmers under their supervision, vet design documents, solve the hard problems that bubble up from the lower ranks, act as diplomats coordinating with other departments and generally providing guidance and a calming influence when things go wrong.  In terms of work, senior programmers are expected to conceive of, design, prototype, implement and review whole systems or domains of a project and to set the direction of the domains they are responsible for without supervision.  Productivity wise a senior programmer can be worth several lesser programmers in terms of output, quality and direction.

Lead Programmer

A lead programmer is a highly specialised senior programmer. The easiest way to describe a lead programmer is that if the project fails it is their fault, at least according to managment.  So a lead programmer is the programmer that is responsible for the overall project design, planning, direction, progress and ultimate sucesss.  This role usually requires more people and planning skills than the senior programmer role, so where a lead programmer can have a break from leading for a cycle and act as a senior programmer on some other leads project, a senior programmer cannot always act as a lead due to a potential lack of the nessessary skills.  It must also be pointed out that some senior programmers don’t want the responsibility, high amounts of planning, meetings and people skills required by the lead roles. Such individuals prefer to stick to programming and are in no way less valuable than a lead.