For engineers, in everyday experience you will have contact with information that someone is senior position and someone is not, but what does it mean? Of course, generally two positions have different pay-grade (not always), but is there any general rule to help us understand that piece?

Seniority in any profession represents “the amount of freedom to make a decision independently”.

In many companies you will have senior people without any freedom following strict rules and that have to get approval for even tiny decisions, in others you will have junior people completely independent. In one of my previous positions I asked about one colleague why he is junior developer and manager said: “because he is young”. I asked then: “so why he is in charge of many important roles” and the answer was: “because he is reliable and excellent professional”. That shows how managers make decisions based on wrong parameters which could lead to HR disaster, to leaving of great professionals and in the end to company/project value drop which in the end financially hits owners.

If you have more experience, especially full stack one, and you showed independent thinking and reliability you deserve more senior position. But you can be professional all your life and stay in junior role because you didn’t show the ability to make a reasonable decisions, good for project.

Other, not far from this one, is question what makes you an architect? If you check the book it says: “architect is role that have mutual understanding of development and infrastructure”. If you are great developer or if you are great infrastructure engineer you do not need to be architect. You need both to be one because of level of expected decisions you make. In building construction you cannot be an architect if you are only designer or if you are only construction professional. Again, you need both. Otherwise you are well-payed senior/lead developer or senior/lead infrastructure engineer.

What is after everything position of manager? By the book, manager is: “person in charge for managing of resources”. Managers position is responsible to do whatever he/she can to increase the value of resources he/she manage. The most important and valuable resource are human resources because they contain big value and they are very frequently grown in the company by education and experience. When you see “great work conditions” in Google or some other companies that is only because managers of those companies recognized that it will increase motivation and productivity of all workers and in the end increase more the value of the company than it is a cost.

With managers you have junior, senior managers (now you understand the rule) and top manager often called CEO that is entrusted by owners with a power to make all decisions independently.

I hope this short text will help you to be great in your position and to create more value to the company you are working in. Be productive, be innovative!

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