Why Senior Developers Need Each Other
I’ve started something new: indydevs, a network of very senior developers.
It’s not a company in the usual sense, and it’s not an agency. It’s a community: experienced developers - most of them independent, all of them people who have been building software seriously for a long time - who meet, talk shop, share work, and refer each other. I want to explain why I think something like this needs to exist.
The senior developer is surprisingly alone
When you’re a junior developer, you’re surrounded by help. Bootcamps, courses, mentors, meetups, endless tutorials, and a team lead whose job is partly to teach you.
When you’ve been doing this for fifteen or twenty years, most of that disappears. The meetups are pitched at people learning their first framework. The conference talks are introductions to things you used five years ago. If you’re independent, you don’t even have a team. You’re the most experienced person in every room you walk into, and that’s lonelier than it sounds.
But senior developers still have questions. They’re just different questions:
- How do I price a project for a company that’s never hired an independent before?
- This client wants to rewrite everything in a new framework. How do I push back without losing the client?
- Is anyone else seeing this weird issue with [some specific tool] in production?
- I have more work than I can handle this quarter. Who’s good, and available?
- I’m burned out on this kind of project. What else is out there?
The best people to answer those questions are other senior developers. And there was nowhere they reliably met.
What a network is for
In my experience, a few things happen when you get experienced developers in a room together:
1. Work moves around. Senior independents constantly have more work than they can take, or less than they want. A trusted network smooths that out. When I can’t take a project, I want to hand it to someone I know is excellent - that’s good for me, good for them, and very good for the client.
2. Knowledge moves around. Not tutorial knowledge - the hard-won kind. Which hosting provider quietly degraded. How someone handled a client who wouldn’t pay. What actually happened when someone tried the shiny new thing in production. You can’t Google this stuff.
3. Standards go up. When you spend time with people who are better than you at something, you get better at it. When you spend time with people who share your values about craft - simple systems, clear code, honest estimates - those values get reinforced.
4. It’s just more fun. Building software alone for years can be grinding. Talking to people who understand exactly what you do, and why it’s hard, is a relief.
Why “very senior”
I’m deliberately keeping the bar high. Not because junior developers don’t matter (they very much do, and they have lots of good communities already), but because a community is defined by the conversations it can have. A room where everyone has shipped and maintained serious systems for years can skip the basics and get to the interesting part immediately.
It’s also what makes the referrals work. If you refer someone from the network to a client, you need to be confident they’ll do great work. A high bar makes that trust possible.
What we actually do
Mostly, we talk. We get together - in person when we can - for small roundtable discussions on real topics, with someone experienced leading each one. We share opportunities. We help each other out. Nothing fancy, which is how I like my systems, too.
I’ll write more about it as it grows. If you’re a very senior developer and this sounds like something you’ve been missing, come find us.
And if you’re a company looking for experienced people who can own something end to end: this is where a lot of them are.
Senior developers don’t need more tutorials. They need each other.