For recruiters / managers / tech leads reviewing Senior Developer roles application, what qualities are you looking for when you interview a candidate?
1. Experience with ever increasing levels of responsibility. To me senior engineers/developers should have a minimum of 8-10 years of real experience. The people calling themselves senior that have < 5 years to me almost always not senior level regardless of what title someone let them have -- but I have seen exceptions so you still have to base it on the person.<p>2. People skills, communication, respect for individuals and team<p>3. Minimally ego driven (everyone has an ego, just can't let it get in the way of good decision making)<p>4. Technically competent in design and architecture, but I don't care if you know how to write a B-Tree from scratch or implement some stupid algorithm. What I care about is you know when they are needed and what the design tradeoffs are, if you know that you can lookup the best implementation.<p>5. Team building skills, organization<p>6. I also look personally, for people who are de-escalators and calm. Working people up doesn't solve problems, calmly seeing facts and figuring out a plan is how to solve problems and lead a team.