This is a little bit different than my normal weekly articles. Instead of giving you my own two cents, I'm looking for your opinions on a topic that came to mind recently as I made a few changes to my online presence.

A little background on myself: I just passed one year in my career as a full-time professional Software Developer (yay!) and although I would still consider myself to be a Junior Developer, I decided to remove the "Junior" portion from all of my career-based introductions and profiles and instead simply use ".NET Developer" or "Software Developer".

The reason I chose to make this change has to do with my worry about self-imposed limitations. I am getting more comfortable with much of the things required to be a decent developer - information gathering, product development (before writing code), writing code, refactoring in a pragmatic way, finding good edge cases, and running through a rigorous QA process before releasing to Production. I am certainly no expert, but I'm starting to feel the pieces coming together.

So my question to you, the reader, is:
How long should Junior Developers continue to advertise themselves to the world as a Junior Developer?

• Would you consider there to be a particular 'rite of passage' that a developer should meet before they are not immediately considered a Junior?
• As an interviewer, would you disqualify a developer who opted not to include Junior/Mid-Level/Senior in their own self-qualification, or would you interview them and come to your own conclusion?
• How significant are these titles to others in the field?
• I am not actively job seeking, but do you think I am false-advertising myself?
• Anything else I didn't consider?

This is something I've been mulling over for the last week or so and I am excited to get a discussion going on this!