tech-companyI was asked recently which job I wanted to apply for job:
Most people – outside of startups – thought these were all the same role. Then I asked within startups and got mixed messages.
These roles all kind of overlap in various ways and recruiters, marketers or people outside the programming space often ask me to pick just one.
Any ideas for what the distinctions might be?
In my own experience it usually goes something like this:
Developer is the rank and file. They can be junior or senior or what have you, it doesn’t matter. What counts is that they’ll be doing the day to day execution.
Lead Developer usually is a senior developer in charge of leading a team of developers. That often means they’ll be throwing grunt work at a few juniors and providing guidance to the latter. Depending on the lead dev and their team they’ll either stick to project managing the whole thing, or assign a hard task or three to themselves while the others team members work on the more mundane tasks (or on tasks they’re specialized in).
Software Architect is a very senior dev who gets involved in high level software design-related questions. They vet architectural choices made by others, tackle some of architectural design themselves, and offer guidance as to how long this or that will take for the developers.
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