Experienced developers get work done faster. That’s why they are able to get ahead in their careers and are in such high demand, even in a competitive job market.
4 Ways Senior Devops Do Things Faster
- They understand all the components that need to work together in a production application.
- They are experts in one software language or another.
- They know how to find the right tech for a particular job.
- They work through roadblocks to get a job done.
Generally speaking, any software application or feature starts as a list of requirements from a businessperson or group. Then a software developer analyzes the requirements and proposes a way to make that application or feature a reality; in other words, the implementation.
How is it that more senior engineers are able to shorten the time between receiving requirements and building software features or applications? Here’s how.
They Get the Complexity of a Production Application
Junior devs will not understand all the components that need to work together in a production application. Though a young engineer’s energy combined with innate talent in many cases might enable them to work faster than senior devs in one development arena or another, they will often need to redo work because of unexpected conflicts between pieces of the extended application that they did not consider.
This extended application knowledge only comes from real experience standing up production-grade websites. Behind the user interface of a website, a long laundry list of things needs to come together before the web application is ready to ship to production.
Devops is one major topic area — configuring the tools to move the application to a place where it can be accessed on the open internet. Then there’s determining the actual cloud resources required for the application to run at a high level of performance and low cost, generally called cloud architecture.
Finally, other important requirements, among them search engine optimization, content delivery networks, content management and authentication, need to be considered for production applications. A misstep in any one of these areas can result in requiring fundamental changes to an entire application.
The result of all this complexity is that senior engineers will build things that are more likely to not require re-work due to any of these adjacent concerns, while junior engineers are more likely to have to rebuild features because they haven’t fully considered one or more of the above items.
They Know the Fundamentals of Programming
Senior engineers, for the most part, are experts in one software language or another. They might not be the best at all of them, but they have learned all the fundamental concepts in one language. This knowledge is extremely valuable when working on anything new, because you know which patterns to implement as well as what to expect from a new programming language or framework.
One example might be encapsulation: A fundamental paradigm in C# (an object-oriented programming language) is the concept of a “Class” for creating an object with properties and methods. The class can encapsulate logic internally so that implementers or users of that class don’t need to know the internals of how the class works.
In React, this might look like a class component, and in Javascript it might look like a factory function, but the concept is exactly the same: encapsulating logic to reduce the interdependence of software components. This pattern of programming has many advantages and can reduce re-work and maintainability, from the largest software application to the smallest feature.
Senior developers know about this concept and understand the massive benefits that it can have, so they will always try to implement it, no matter what language or framework they work in. Junior developers just don’t know these concepts as well, and might prioritize getting their job done over building with time-tested software design.
They Can Find the Right Tech for the Job
It’s rare, at least in the 21st century, for technologies to entirely change the way applications are developed for the internet. Therefore, most newly created technologies fit into one or many web development roles. React.js, for example, is for building a user interface, delivering HTML and Javascript to the browser, while Unity is a framework for rendering 3d graphics.
Junior devs don’t have the experience to know what is truly possible using a specific technology, be it a language, framework or tool. The result is that they tend to miss the mark when it comes to matching the technology to the actual requirements by picking a tool that is either too complex or too limited for the requirements at hand.
Senior devs know in a general sense what the scope of a particular technology is and where that scope ends. This knowledge allows a senior dev to come up with a solution that more closely matches the actual requirements for the application or feature, without also doing too much. If your client asks for a small interactive widget to add to their webpage, you should probably not build them a full-featured Dotnet Core application, you should code that widget using a lightweight scripting language like Javascript.
In the end, this saves the senior dev a huge amount of time because they will be able to build something closer to the best possible solution, rather than building something that over-covers or does not cover the requirements.
They Don’t Give Up
A more senior developer will be more sure of their research and tech decisions, and will therefore be able to persevere through roadblocks to bring that idea to life.
In every implementation, there are moments where there is a bug or issue that is tough to resolve. In those moments the strong tendency is to try to work around the problem, giving up on the initial tech decision, and bypassing the problem by using a suboptimal strategy. This behavior can double or triple the amount of time required to build a feature or application, first because reworking creates more work around the problem, and second because it increases the likelihood of maintenance down the line.
There is a difference between understanding that something should be possible in programming and actually proving that it is possible. A senior developer is more likely to push through challenges and stick to the original tech choice.
Better Together
These four skills might seem fairly minor by themselves, but together they make a major difference in the speed of a project completion. Programmers’ difficult job is to balance business requirements against technical feasibility, and it’s easy to wander down the wrong path when it comes to your implementation.
Senior developers bring value to a team through their holistic knowledge of programming subject matter and their confidence and directness in pursuing the right strategy.
