Experience isn't the years you've logged

Last time I asked whether you're a junior, middle, or senior. But I split those by years on the job — and honestly, that's not quite right.

A developer's skill doesn't grow on a timeline.

You can write code for a decade and stay roughly where you started. And you can cover ground in a couple of years that usually takes far longer. Time in the chair barely tells you anything.

What actually moves you is the complexity of the problems you deal with.

And here's the part most people miss: that complexity isn't handed to you by the outside world. You set most of it yourself — through the bar you hold for your code, your architecture, and the quality of your decisions.

When the only goal is "make it work," the solutions stay shallow. Experience trickles in, and you hit a ceiling early — usually somewhere around junior, or freelance-that-works-well-enough.

The moment you start caring about quality — clean architecture, a structure someone can actually read, principles you don't break — the curve gets steep. That's how you become a middle who knows not just *what* they're doing but *why*.

And senior? Senior starts where the work is less about tasks and more about constraints.

Trimming calls to the backend. Cutting rebuilds. Working around a platform limit. Deliberately turning down the convenient solution for the correct one. That's a different order of difficulty — and a different way of thinking.

If I compress the whole thing into one line:

Experience isn't tenure. Experience is the total complexity of the different problems you've actually solved.

So — what's the hardest constraint you're wrestling with in your work right now?