Sounds to me like they hired a junior because they couldn’t afford a senior, rather than because they actually wanted a junior (someone they can invest in and mentor until they become a senior). I have managed a team who had that decision forced upon them by managers who didn’t know better.

He ended up with all sorts of unfortunate jobs like creating training videos for users and such and I still feel guilty about it now, but I was under pressure to deliver and the expectation was that adding a head to the development room would only speed things up.

It’s unfortunate, because it puts you and your boss in tricky positions.

He probably doesn’t have any work he can trust to a junior, and any seniors he might have can’t be distracted from their day-to-day. The easy way out is to give the junior lots of non-development tasks, which he also doesn’t really want to waste senior developers’ time with.

But a few problems arise from this.

First, the kind of devops jobs he’s giving you really require a senior developer. Particularly, a build server should be set up by someone who is building the software and knows where the pain-points are.

Second, the junior isn’t becoming more useful. After five years of this, you’d still be doing the same tasks, because you still couldn’t be trusted with actual development work.

Third, the junior will eventually (as you have) realise that they’re not helping their own career. The assumption that juniors are low-quality, rather than low on (and looking for) experience is a terrible, but very common, mistake in this industry.

So, yes, sit down with your boss. But understand the predicament he’s in. See if you can come to some arrangement which solves everybody’s problems. You are going to need a senior mentor and some of your current tasks are going to need to be passed on to a senior. This will slow the project down but, in the long run, it will pay off. That’s the point you need to get through to your boss, and possibly to their bosses. Also, see if you can find something you can offer in return to mitigate the costs.

If you can’t then you might want to look elsewhere.

I find the term “Software Developer” to be synonymous with “Programmer”. Thus a software developer is a person whose primary responsibility is to write code. In my first job, my title was “Developer”, and my primary responsibility was to design and code software. But I think that there is no exact definition of the term. It is used differently by different people, thus the meaning becomes fuzzy.

But for a development team to work efficiently, you must have these things set up, CI servers, SQL replication, Deployment to test servers, monitoring of test servers, archiving of builds, etc. (Maybe not all of them applies in any situation).

These tasks will take up a large amount of time in a project’s initial phase, but will take up a smaller amount of time once you have a nice setup running.

Unfortunately, developers would rather code than managing build servers. Therefore often, these boring tasks fall in the hands of junior developers, as the senior developers have more important tasks.

I have not experienced any company that uses these tasks as a means to evaluate skills.

If you are dissatisfied with your current responsibilities, I would suggest taking up the issue with your line manager.

It depends. It seems that different companies define this differently and for some it is an umbrella term for an array of technical functions. For some it is just a title. Asking the same question before, I got an answer similar to “Only developers have the capability to do this in our organization”, I’d say maybe, but that does not necessarily make it development).

The theoretical answer is that a developer (comparing with coder/programmer) is a person who “solves problems” even if they do not have to do with “coding something”.

You want to code more, so maybe ask your manager for more coding tasks or to do some of the things you do by coding? You mentioned operational stuff, so maybe some of them could be done by DevOps frameworks (check chef and puppet), which will make the functions more efficient and are close to development.

It is not uncommon for a Developer to be expected to have some system administration skills. As a senior developer, I estimate that about 5% of my time is spent on such tasks.

However, if you are not doing any coding, then you probably should talk to your manager about getting coding tasks. After all, you want to build up coding experience. You are also more valuable as a programmer than as a system administrator.

Code is not terribly useful if it doesn’t get built into an application properly, or access the correct data, so the activities you list seem very much in line with what a developer does. I should add that software developers also get very mixed up in documentation and testing as well. These are activities necessary in the production of software.

It’s great if your company has specialists that can do this stuff for you, but if not, software developers are responsible for everything up to (and possibly including) deploying an application into production and supporting it there.

It is fairly common for a developer in a small to medium sized company to take on some server administrator/DBA/general configuration tasks.

However, if these tasks start to become the bulk of your responsibilities, it may be something to be concerned about depending on your career goals. Though you can probably thrive within certain companies as a general technologist, when you need to move to a new company it can cause many issues in your transition. If you are not doing any traditional development, you need to be sure to make that clear on your resume. If you want to get a job in straight development after a stint in a job as you described, you may have to accept something you are “overqualified” for based on years in the industry.

On the other hand, there may be companies looking for developers with diverse skills. But with the current trend of writing code in interviews, you will need to have top notch coding skills as well, even if the job requires little code once you get in.

If you don’t want to get stuck in your current position, I would definitely try to remedy the situation soon.