Revealed: The 5-Steps-Method Our Mentees Use To Get To Senior Developer Faster And Earn More

After returning to the job market Lucian realised his technical and interviewing skills needed to improve to land the job he wanted.

Lucian was mostly self-taught, which means his fundamentals could improve. He also has been exposed to only one major codebase in his career, he had to improve his architecture skills.

With renewed confidence after going through Software Mastery, Lucian returned to the market, landing a Senior level position where he almost doubled his salary.

Arti was suffering from impostor syndrome and wanted to fill her technical gaps. As a self-taught career changer, she never got proper guidance beyond online courses and side projects.

A tailored plan for her to improve her fundamentals with a focus on getting deeper into the frontend and adding more skills on the full-stack.

Arti successfully up-skilled herself to the Senior level, leading her to survive a significant round of layoffs at her company. After a few months, switched positions to a bigger company with a better salary and title.

After coding for more than 3 years, Ioannis’s skill set was limited to outdated technologies, which made it hard for him to be competitive in the job market.

After analyzing his skillset, we put in place a plan for Ioannis to strengthen his fundamentals and get a better understanding of software development best practices.

After Software Mastery, Ioannis has been able to upgrade his skills to the Senior level, switching jobs and countries and moving to his dream city, Berlin.

As a self taught developer Fahed has been working with the JavaScript stack for a while and he was hungry for something more, but every time he tried, Impostor Syndrome would hold him back. At his job, he spent most of his time fixing bugs, and never got the chance to build strong fundamentals.

After analyzing Fahed’s gaps we put together a personalized roadmap and went straight to work. He applied our Mastery System to his particular situation and got feedback from us at every point of the journey. He took action, implemented, and also got extremely involved in the community.

After working with us, Fahed almost doubled his salary within just a few weeks, and not only that but he made the transition from “coder” to “engineer” that he’s been looking for. He went from guessing his way out through things to being able to deliver with full confidence, end-to-end like a true Senior Developer.

Kirsten's challenge came from her experience as a self-taught engineer and the relatively small company she was working at. She became the “Jane of all trades” jumping from feature development to bug fixes to setting up infrastructure topics. As a result, she lacked the technical depth required for a Senior Engineer. Confused by the number of blog posts and tutorials out there, she reached out to us to craft a clear path for her to the next level.

The biggest breakthrough in the case of Kirsten and the first thing we did was finding out first what were the exact gaps in her knowledge. The second step was to leave secondary topics to the side (infrastructure) and focus on gaining depth in the tech stack she wanted to grow in, JavaScript. Using the mental models and principles contained in the Software Mastery program and getting feedback from us all along the way.

In a couple of weeks, Kirsten went from barely getting by having to catch on weekend and evening, to becoming the “go-to” person and leading her team. Shortly after she moved on to a better position that meant a salary increase of roughly 40% in her compensation and offered her the ability to work remotely (something she was looking for since she became a developer). She is now constantly improving herself as part of the community and is on her way to getting her own team.

As a self taught developer Alex struggled with the fundamentals. After spending most of his career working for a startup he became a “Jack of all trades”, knowing a lot about many things but not having deep expertise in any of them.

A personalized roadmap that would focus his efforts on the JavaScript stack, particularly the frontend. As a second step, to master software fundamentals and make the transition from coder to engineer.

Alex took action right away, as a result he deepened his JavaScript understanding and professionalized his frontend understanding. He ended up switching jobs resulting in a 60% salary increase as well as better tech stack and more responsibilities.

Adriana was a fullstack developer, and after almost 5 years writing code felt like getting stuck without making much progress. Even though she felt ready for the next level she didn’t have a clear idea on how to get there. She even thought at some point about leaving Software Development and trying something else. Well lucky she didn't, she decided to join theSeniorDev instead.

Getting into development through a Bootcamp, meant Adriana’s fundamentals were not so strong. That’s actually the first thing that came up after analysing her technical gaps. It was also obvious that she spent too much time jumping from backend to frontend and from framework to framework which only accentuated her gaps and didn’t give her the chance to sharpen her technical skills at a deeper level.

After only a few weeks of working together, Adriana was on the way to making her dream come true, a better position that matched her technical level. What’s more, during the interviews she got the feedback that there were no questions left for her as she nailed them all. She moved on to a bigger company with, a better tech stack, and increased her salary by 45% in the process. Beyond that, she’s built the kind of confidence that will carry her beyond the Senior level.

Ex-lawyer and Software Engineer, Ranjit was almost 3 years into development when he got in touch with us. Throughout his journey, he jumped from startup to startup, which meant limited exposure to codebases at scale. He had doubts about the depth of his knowledge and the quality of the mental models he’s built so far regarding software development. At that point, he started thinking about how to get to the next level and that’s when we got in touch.

Given his startup experience and his self-taught journey, the issues that Ranjit faced were many. On one side, he had to build on his existing knowledge and add more depth to the mix of experiences he’s got. On the other side, he had to widen his experience, particularly on the side of best practices and big-picture understanding (infrastructure, software architecture).

We’ve got to work and after a few weeks working on the foundations, Ranjit started checking out the market with the intention of just getting some feedback. In a matter of weeks he landed an offer that completely blew his expectations, with a 100% salary increase, touching six figures in the London market in his 3rd year of writing code. Way beyond his wildest dreams, he is not motivated to keep growing and working towards the next step.

As a self-taught developer, Raffaele struggled with understanding exactly what things he needed to focus on to get to the next level. Even though he’s been coding for more than four years at the time, he’s been switching different tech-stack and his company didn’t offer any training or mentorship for him to transition to the next level.

The focus with Raffaelle was number one crystalizing his existing knowledge around key principles and fundamentals so he can connect the dots, and be able to deliver with full confidence end to end in the JavaScript (React, Node, TypeScript) stack.

After putting the Software Mastery system in place, Raffaele skyrocketed his confidence in his technical skills being able to overdeliver at his current position, he ended up switching jobs. In the process, he almost doubled his salary and got the flexibility of working 100% remotely which was one of his dream in order to be able to stay close to his family in Italy.

After almost 5 years working professionally as a developer, Imre felt like he was treading water. His knowledge regarding the JavaScript ecosystem and software development as a whole was stagnating, the same with his growth opportunities and overall skills. After dozens of courses, tutorials, and a few side projects he still felt like he was going on in circles.

After analysing his technical skills, we realised the main problem for Imre was not the number of libraries or frameworks he knew, but understanding the why behind them. For example, he was quite familiar with React as a frontend library, but when asked about deeper topics like testing, performance and scalability he would struggle.

Imre got a new job with a better team, a modern stack, and a nice pay increase. He also gained a strong technical foundation on top of his self-taught knowledge and was able to move towards a more Senior position with full confidence. Still, part of our community he is now focused on succeeding in the new position as well as fulfilling his responsibilities as a father.

After working professionally as a developer for the last 3 years, Renee was looking to level up. She made the transition to software development through a Bootcamp. At her current job, she was in charge of enterprise integrations of a proprietary framework based on Python and JavaScript.

The solution with Renee's was at its core to regain back the focus. In her time writing code, she’s been jumping from JavaScript full-stack to Python backend to enterprise integrations. She knows a bit of everything but she wasn’t particularly strong in any of those tech stacks.

In the next months of working with our team, Renee went from the “Jane of all trades” to a strong JavaScript developer ready for the jump to a more Senior level. Even though it wasn’t her initial intention, she ended up switching jobs with a 50% salary increase, a bigger team, and a better stack.

After a career change to tech Goksen struggled to deliver at the level she wante to. What’s more she accumulated experience in different tech stack but knew none too deep. She wanted more responsibility and a level that reflected her skills.

The first thing we did was to focus all her efforts on what she liked most, that si the React framework, as well as deepen her knowledge of the full-stack (backend, software lifecycle). The aim was to deepen and professionalize the stack of skills.

Goksen successfully transitioned into a more Senior position, working with her favorite stack and an almost 70% salary increase. She is now working towards an Engineering Manager position.

Well into his 3rd position as a developer Scott noticed that his lack of formal Computer Science degree was holding him back from making the transition into a higher position. Online courses, blog articles, and advice from senior devs only managed to confuse him further, and given his family obligations, he almost lost hope.

After our initial chat, we realized most of Scott’s issues were due to him having to switch projects so often. He lacked a deep understanding of design patterns and programming principles beyond frameworks.

In the weeks of working together Scott went from being the one asking for help to the top software developer in his team. Shortly after, he switched companies to higher positions with a final 58% increase in salary and flexible hours(one of his goals, as he wanted to have more time for his family).

A clear step-by-step action plan based on his own technical gaps that would cover the lacking fundamentals and propel him into the Senior level, Michel refreshed his understanding of the frontend and expanded his knowledge of the complete software lifecycle.

A clear step-by-step action plan based on his own technical gaps that would cover the lacking fundamentals and propel him into the Senior level, Michel refreshed his understanding of the frontend and expanded his knowledge of the complete software lifecycle.

With refreshed confidence in his skills as a full-stack developer, Michael increased his freelance rate and got accepted into an elite network for freelance programmers.