At that point you are an entrepreneur. The division only exists in large companies with highly segmented job roles. The more hats you have to wear, the less that line shows.
> The division only exists in large companies with highly segmented job roles.
In some companies, yes, but it's all relative to the company. Each company has its own job titles and levels. It would make sense to write a blog post about "How to get promoted to [title] in [company]". (And the honest answer might be self-promotion or brownnosing, for example.) The problem is that too many developers try to actualize and abstract these arbitrary job titles into some fundamental category of programming reality that exists independently of arbitrary corporate job titles. That's what I mean about drinking the corporate kool-aid. There are continual debates in blog posts and on social media about what "senior developer" means, with no reference to a particular company or job within a company, and I consider the debate to be all nonsense. It's worse than spaces vs. tabs, because at least spaces and tabs are real, well-defined characters.
This kind of discussion is in part due to pressures from HR, again something more common in big companies. To standardize hiring practices HR people do something called banding or leveling where they do try to define job levels and responsibilities across the industry. Primarily so they know what to pay people. Also so people can plan career tracks.
Yeah it’s all Kool Aid but a lot of people are drinking it. Also there is a demonstrable difference between someone who just codes and someone who leads projects. Generally the senior path can be seen as a technical leader path, and that is transferable between companies.
But the word senior itself has lost meaning. Senior at my company is squarely in the middle. Principals are the true seniors.
