Every Developer Archetype Explained in 17 Minutes

Let's talk about every level of software engineering from the viber coder all the way to the technical co-founder. Let's start with number one, the vibe coder. Basically, they don't really code, AI does the coding for them, they dream with a quick money and they will be surfing in Bali by starting a SAS business, all done with tail and cursor in the cloud code. They don't really know what they don't know, they are willing to try anything and inner is a blessing, so they couldn't care less about HTTP or protocols or how CSS specificity really works.

They're just going to have the AI doing everything. Uh they have no real software delivery skill, most of the knowledge comes from Twitter and some obscure repository generated with AI and obviously, as soon as the AI bubble will burst, they will be out of the game because again, they don't have real expertise. They live embred by AI, so they really laugh at the traditional devs, saying, hey, you just got this up date, nobody needs to learn to code anymore. AI is going to act like a compiler.

Who cares about the code? You will care as much about the code as you care about the transpiler today. So basically, they are laughing at us developers thinking we got replaced by Chat GPT. And to unlock the next level, what a vibe coder needs to do is to get off Twitter and get in and learn some real software engineering. Get some debugging skills, get the mental models in, start with the fundamentals, and those ones will be useful even if AGR might happen.

Now, let's go with number two, the web developer, and this is a very common profile. Basically, this person, uh they started building websites with website builders like WordPress, back in the days, webflow. They can get things done fast, they work a lot with the end customers, they do know HTML, CSS and JavaScript, they can hack around quickly things, they know SEO, they might know web performance.

But they are assemblers, not builders. So yes, they can use WordPress, but they couldn't build it. And so it's hard for them to build things from scratch, they always need to start with a template or reverse engineer something. on surface and they use the AI to really plan out their work. They use to learn new things. For them it's what stack overflow used to be. Uh, but they might end up in AI loops just because they don't have those mental models, so kind of chat GPT just pregently bring you to the next step without a clear idea.

So, so you could say they cannot see sometimes the forest from the tree. To unlock the next level, they will need to pick a JavaScript framework and really learn how to build things from scratch. So go from, okay, I'm using WordPress to how would you build something like WordPress and really get into the engineering aspect rather than just being a user. And by the way, if you don't know us, I'm Bogdon from the senior dev together with my brother Drarosh, we help Java script developers become irreplaceable, despite layoffs and despite AI by acquiring senior level thinking and senior level mental models and being able to sell yourself as a senior and get that senior position.

Now, let's go with the junior dev and this is where things get more interesting. These people usually have one to two years writing code, sometimes more. Uh, you would see people still in the junior seat with three to five years depending on the exposure they had. They do work well in a defined application and they really get whenever you already have certain components to take that and change it and adapt it to whatever the requirements are.

They're curious, they're excited, so it's usually good to have them in the team. But they get distracted easily, uh they can get stuck in tutorial hell. It's very hard to deliver end to end, they cannot go out of that component kind of mindset or script mindset and go into end to end uh delivery or architecture. They sometimes struggle to understand how things scale and there's a lot of things that they can't really put their name on.

So they wouldn't be able to tell you how a module bundler works or why we have our CCD in a certain way. When they learn, they do a lot of trial and error, it's harder to be strategic in problem solving. And uh they do have a big impostor syndrome because obviously, you know, confidence comes from competence and they have all these gaps and they kind of know it. So that creates a bit of uh of anxiety.

They can't survive without GPT. They speak to GPT most of than anyone in the office, they have endless chats with them. But sometimes, even with GPT, they still feel like they're they're slower than than the seniors. To unlock, uh, the next level, what you need at the junior level is to really focus and own that hill. So you want to get really good. If you're doing React, you want to go way beyond the surface and learn how it works under the hood, learn JavaScript very well, and stay focused, which is one of the hardest thing because you'll get a lot of things thrown at you and you can't really tell, uh, which one should I really focus on.

It feels like there's so much to learn, and that's why you want to divide and conquer. Well, if you want to find out if you're a junior, mid level, or senior level or which level are you at, take our technical assessment and you'll see exactly on the seniority scale. Now, let's move on with the mid level dev. So usually a mid level would have four to five years experience. And sometimes they move on, they might be a back end that knows a bit off front end, they might be a front end dev that knows a bit of back end.

Their strength is that they are more autonomous than a junior because they do know the application level. Whereas the juniors work at component level, a mid level would work more for an application level, and they can actually deliver features. The problem is that they can't really transfer their knowledge across projects because a lot of their knowledge is very project bounded. And so they might have poor habits, like console logging.

But, you know, they they do enough to survive. That gives them sometimes a very false feeling of confidence. So, even if they can deliver on the job, sometimes they would go in interview and they cannot really get another job. That's because their expertise, it's usually related to what they've been working on, but you once they go out of that, it's very hard to understand or to translate or show their expertise.

They still have a bit of imposter syndrome, and they can't really explain you why things are done in a certain way. They can tell you how and the what, but they struggle with the why. They do use AI to deliver faster. And sometimes, again, because of this false sense of confidence, they would use it to, you know, go and and go against the senior dev or kind of, you know, start debating things. So they would use it.

Yeah, I was in a lie. Now, Twan looked the next day up, they would need to really go a lot deeper and also focus on transferable knowledge. So, you need full stack skills, interviewing skills, and a lot of a more broader view. So, you really need to go out of that confident space, which is the application they've been working on and go outside and say, okay, but then how do I apply this now to everything else?

And then there's the senior devs. Now, senior devs usually have five more years of experience and they definitely have full stack knowledge. It's extremely hard to get to that senior level without knowing a bit of full stack. Because a lot of the problems in software are distributed, a lot of the errors are distributed, and you need to go and debug across the stack. You cannot just stay in the front end.

You would probably need help to fix things if you just know one aspect, like if you just know the back end or the front end. And that's when your seniority will be questioned. They can deliver in trend. They just need a product manager. They're literally a feature machine. They can plug into an existing team and they'll start delivering code right away, that's exactly why companies are really willing to pay a lot because the value they add, it's usually from day one, and they add a lot of value.

They didn't really need assistance, they don't need more costs. They're really an input to their bottom line. Sometimes they might get the senior title, but the skills might not be there. Or they have too strong opinions, they're too independent, so usually when you have three seniors in a team, it's extremely hard because each one of them wants to do things a certain way. They also might have been burned out in the past.

So again, even if they're really good, they'll go in, they'll release a lot of features and then they'll get burned out. Uh they might hoard knowledge because we have these flat hierarchies, so they need to show they are senior. And one of the easiest ways to just have certain areas where they pretend to be the best and you cannot get in there. They might still struggle with technical interviews if they stayed too much in one place.

Uh because skills slowly deteriorate. Also, senior it's one of the levels where you can coast a lot, so they can just stay there for like five years and then they find themselves in a market that changed. They don't rely on the AI that much. Again, they know the domain. But they do use all. master. Now, they sometimes are burnout because they need to give you all this code that they're the mid levels and juniors use out with the AI. So, the final responsibility of quality in the code base falls on their shoulders. Now, to go to the next level, again, they don't really have to. They can stay there for the next 20 years. It's a very good place in a way because you have a lot of options if they can transfer their knowledge to other stacks and domains. And if they can uh interview very well, they can even level up to principal and staff if they go deeper. So, it's a very good place to be, but you've got to be very careful and make sure you keep your skills very sharp. Then there's the tech lead, which you probably all know here on YouTube. And so a tech lead it's a senior dev that's usually leading a small team, usually it's a startup or a mid-sized company. In bigger companies, they split these roles into a technical lead and an engineering manager. It's usually one of the hardest position to be in and probably tech leads are the ones that burn out the most. Because they have the management responsibility, but then they also need to be hands-on. And so these two, it's extremely high to fight a war on two fronts as they say. They do have a lot of delivery power, they do have team respect, and they do know enough in order to hire people and organize them in an efficient way. So, they would know how to organize a C-CD pipeline, they would know how to set up the system so that developers are more productive. Now, because they are pulled into all these meetings, their technical skills might deteriorate and they end up being pushed to management. They might even struggle to get a senior dev job again because then they are pushed to be hands-on again. So, again, it's this constant switch where they're still hands-on, so the developers need them, but then management pulls them into uh planning and you know, they're also responsible for things getting delivered. So, it's a very, very tough position to be in. They use AI to catch up on coding, again, because they're being pulled in all this management. So, they also rely a lot on the auto complete and as a therapist when things go very bad. So, for the tech leads to unlock the next level, they would either need to give up management or give up development.

ment, because you can't serve to Masters for a long time, you'll either burnout or be extremely incompetent in one of those. So either the code suffers or in the management side, they are not able to manage stakeholders and finally they get fired or burn out. Finally, let's talk about the staff engineer. So basically the staff engineer, it's like a senior dev on steroids. They are excellent coders, but they get system thinkers at the same time.

And they can make very complex technical decisions very fast and without a lot of context. And that's why they help the company move a lot faster. They have a lot of breadth, but also a lot of depth. So whereas seniors are sometimes bounded to the specific platform, like some people are senior on the web. The staff engineer, they can move from the web to mobile, to maybe embedded software very fast.

On the weaknesses side, they can become a bit disconnected from the team. They are also sometimes very intimidating. So juniors and mid levels, they they are a bit afraid to relate to to those principal engineers. And also they need a big company or a very technological company to support their position. So there's not so many positions. It's very niche and so it's not so easy to go from one company to the other.

They might end up being siloed or just doing fire fighting all the time. Sometimes they are hired to take care of the architecture system design, but end up helping the teams in their low level coding. And it's more of this firefighting role where you go from one team to the other and you help them tackle very hard tickets and the problem there is that you can also end up burn out. They use AI as a piece of infrastructure.

So they can think on how do we add LLMs to our system to improve something for our users. They don't just go in and and like query GPT. They are extremely good, so they might use LLMs to reference something from the documentation very fast as a retrieval machine. But they don't use AI for the pure design, not even for the coding. They may you know, AI doesn't really make them much much more productive because they're already extremely good.

For them, the next level, it's more of a lifestyle choice. Do they want to go into freelancing? Do they want to co-found? Or do they want to switch to management? So, it's depending more uh on the kind of lifestyle they want. But again, the biggest danger, it's burnout. So, one of the things they sometimes neglect, it's it's politics. And so, uh if they learn office politics and if they learn how to negotiate things, then they can have a very long and very fruitful career with extremely uh high salaries.

Finally, there's the uh VP or director. And so this person was coding at some point in time, but now they are a full manager. Their strength, it's usually people's skills. Uh they have very polished LinkedIn. Uh and in the best case, they know a lot about software project management and software operational excellence. In the worst case, they are just a political person that got very high up. They know the right people and they know how to talk.

But they don't know much about software and and they're making developers life a lot harder. Their weaknesses are that it's a very political position, is very tied up to the company and it's very hard for them to keep up their skills. So sometimes if there's a restructuring and they get laid off, usually they need to go back and go back, you know, at some point in the mid level and then get to senior again.

Well, it's refreshes of technical skills. And what we've seen in 2024 and even 2025, there's been a big push towards the age of efficiency, both at meta, Amazon and other companies where they laid off a lot of the management layer. And so all those people, all of a sudden realize, okay, now I need to be handson because everybody is saying we want handson engineering manager. Which is more or less closer to the tech lead.

So a lot of them had to go back and learn those skills again. They use AI a lot because they don't code, so obviously they need that AI copilot to to help them code. But they're not vibe coding. Okay, they they know a lot more than than your vibe coder about the software architecture. To unlock the next level, they need to wait until the uh CTO gets sacked and they make a move if they want to stay on that track or they can go back to to the senior staff role. Afterwards. So again, it's not a matter of staying in that position, uh, forever. They might have to bounce back into an individual contributor role or a management role where they do a lot of individual coding. If you are a JavaScript developer, we at the senior dev will help you become a placeable, develop senior level thinking and thrive, despite the AI hype and the layoffs. Check the links in the description and see our free training. Finally, the CTO. And so basically the CTO, it's a very special position because not all CTOs are created equal. It really depends on the company, it depends how they got there, some of them are pure political because company's very big. Some CTOs are closer to a staff engineer because they're very hands-on, especially in smaller companies. The problem with the CTO is that they can end up becoming like the shit sandwich between the management and the tech teams, basically the CEO and the organization is pushing, you know, IT or tech, however you want to call it. And then the CTO is kind of in the middle. They might be too isolated from the trenches, let's say it. And so sometimes it's hard for them to empathize, what to really understand what's going on. These they are pressured to use AI for everything, they're pressured to push the developers to use AI, and they are pressured to claim that the AI is making dev a lot more productive, and even if they might not believe that, they need to say it. That's just the politics at that level to unlock the next level. They just need to survive until the IPO, cash your stocks, and then retire. Now, some unabled mentions before we finish. Number one, the freelance dev, very high pressure position. They are ideally a senior dev, you got to be senior before you go go freelancing. They got fed up with with politics and they wanted to be their own boss and now they work 80 hours instead of 40. But again, uh they usually make a lot more than than they were doing as an employee. The most common problem here is they burn out. They're very adaptable, they have a builder mindset, very ambitious.

cious, but they forget that to really make value, you need a lot of marketing, you need a strong network. And because they spend so much getting customers, managing customers, their skills will also slowly degrade. Then there's the YouTubers, you probably know a lot of them on this platform, they're very charismatic, unless it's a faceless channel, then it's just gifs. And they have a bit of shiny object syndrome, so you know, you're going to go from from Rust to Go, to Vim, to crypto, to whatever takes the click.

Sometimes they might be arrogant and a lot of them they're just functionally unemployed, you could put it that way, they basically retired, they're YouTuber now. And then there's the co-founder, which again, literally can be anybody from a vibe coder to a CTO, to a tech YouTuber, to a senior dev. They could be a university dropout and they have unlimited motivation, that's the strength of the co-founder, but very limited cash flow.

And so this is the acquisition they're playing with that ideally the unlimited level of motivation will bring up the technical skills and if the business side makes sense, then they will end up growing into a CTO role uh before they run out of money. Remember, if you're a jobs developer, we will help you become replaceable, develop that senior level thinking that gives you a lot of power in the market to move up either to a staff or to move up into a management position if you want to and thrive at all times despite of how the market is going, despite of AI or the layoffs.