Java Backend SWE - How to move from Mid-Level to Senior?
According to many people, it seemingly comes down to seniority alone, but that’s not entirely true - as they say, you can have 5 years of experience, or you can have 5 “first years” of experience ;)
I’m a computer science engineer, and I currently have 4 years of commercial experience. I started with 2 years in e-commerce at a large EU corporation that develops and licenses software for the enterprise sector; I’m currently working at a major bank in Poland. Both roles involved the standard Java stack - Spring Boot, Hibernate, Docker, Kafka, Jenkins, etc.
Right now, I’m on a team where I don’t see any huge opportunities for growth; all the projects are basically copy-and-paste jobs involving the design of business processes on the company’s internal framework. I feel like it’s hard to really prove myself here, and that I’m doing the same thing as my senior colleagues who’ve been here for years. I can’t even influence the development or optimization of the platform we’re working on - the framework exposes an API that we have to adapt to from the get-go, and that’s it. Besides, the pace is so fast that we’re often juggling two projects at once and don’t have time to polish or tidy up what we’re working on, which makes me feel like I have even less room to maneuver.