That's not a "Senior Programmer" or a "Senior Developer", that is called a Software Architect or a Solutions Architect in other cases, which is, in my opinion, much more important than a Senior Programmer. I really think, that the difference between a Senior and a Junior is the elegance in code and how easy is the code to be changed/improved by someone else. A very notorious difference is the effective coding time (time vrs. errors vrs. non functional requirements) and the number of lines to do the same task. Best practices in design and coding is the key! how fast you can learn and how good you can do it. The senior comes with the time; the time needed depends on you. Solutions Architecture's area is a much more interesting area, where coding phase is just that, a phase. A Solutions/Software architect is the brain in the back, who, most of the times, does not code one single line.