Is there an official definition chart for terms like junior, mid, senior? I keep hearing people sneer at the presumed miss-use of those terms as if everyone knew the official definitions. Last place I worked, senior was just the dev who's been there the longest.
These terms are often defined in terms of autonomy and scope: if you can look around and see what needs to be done, break it down into workable sub-units, wrangle resources somehow (big projects tend to need more than one person working on them), and get it done, that can mean that you're "senior".
I see people on various forums (fora?) asking what number of years of experience makes someone "senior". The most common answer I see is 5. It reminds me of this https://i.imgur.com/7sws9p8.jpg
I have asked this to, and often get told senior is "5+ years" with a specific tech stack, junior is usually specifically aimed at people with no/little experience in a dev role, and mid is anything in between. Not sure how well that generalizes to other geographic areas though.
> Is there an official definition chart for terms like junior, mid, senior?
No. Every company has different definitions and different positions have different meanings. Then there is lead manager, product manager, team lead, etc.
Not only that, I've noticed the position titles are different depending on the company. A junior developer in one HR department might be Programmer Analyst in another HR department.
But generally for me, anyone with 1-4 years is junior, 5-9 is mid and 10+ is senior. But that's just my arbitrary definition.
'senior' is also purposefully being used to make a position more desirable, by sounding better. People like showing off and tend to agree to a lower salary that way.
