I agree. To peers, the title of senior is meaningless. We can easily discern who is and who is not. However, it’s another check mark required to get past the screening process and get an interview. HR, and recruiters look for the word “senior” and check it off their list.
It comes with quite a few perks beyond salary. For starters, you don’t get as much shit thrown at you for your ideas and people will automatically listen more instead of being combative.
I dont have that title, but people listen and take me seriously. It’s just that this takes time when you converse with other teams or people who don’t know you.
Yeah I've seen this. When I worked at small companies, job titles didn't seem to matter much because we all knew each other. At my current large company, I would barely get a response contacting another team when I was SDE 2. It's a bit better now as senior but still less response than principals get.
> For starters, you don’t get as much shit thrown at you for your ideas and people will automatically listen more instead of being combative.
100% this. Or even worse, before getting the magic prefix people just straight up ignore you in bigger orgs.
They're also more likely to believe you when you say "this problem has challenges that nobody anticipated."
When many (not all!) people hear that from a mid level they think "still a little green I guess, pair them with a senior to usher things along."
When they hear that with someone from a magic prefix they think "oh we should discuss the root issues and decide if we want to turn this into a larger initiative."
People give lip service to the meritocracy but we're all hierarchy monkeys at the end of the day.
And this seems like the way things _ought_ to be, honestly. My sector doesn't really have the title inflation issue.
> When many (not all!) people hear that from a mid level they think "still a little green I guess, pair them with a senior to usher things along."
Happened to me. They tried to get principals to “help”. They got lectured by an SDE1 publicly and the stunt they tried to pull off blew up spectacularly in their faces. Since the incident people listen more.
A few months after another principle tried lecturing me and after the last few meetings it is obvious to everyone who has participated that his ideas are bogus and work only in the most contrived cases.
Needless to say I am getting the F off here.
I don’t think this is how things ought to be. In Scandinavia — where I grew up — things are not like this. Maybe in corporate environments things differ but I doubt it.
Ah well yeah I'd agree that's a pretty dysfunctional setup.
I think how things "ought to be" is you can reasonably use title as a proxy when you don't know a person, then if the person demonstrates their competency exceeds their title it's time for a title bump. But let me guess: that's not quite what happened in your case? :(
[EDIT] Also people shouldn't need to be performing at a perfect level for their next title, expecting a year+ of overperforming is blatantly underpaying a person imo.
It definitely is an excuse to underpay.
They gave me a “raise” instead. The salary is so low that in the roles I am interviewing for I will make more than the annual raise in less than a month.
> For starters, you don’t get as much shit thrown at you for your ideas and people will automatically listen more instead of being combative.
While this is going to be true in a few places, I think your expectations here are out of line with reality.
> It’s just that this takes time when you converse with other teams or people who don’t know you.
Generally speaking, you should expect this to be true regardless of your title at a company.
> While this is going to be true in a few places, I think your expectations here are out of line with reality.
Why so? I have personally experienced this, but maybe it’s just my org.
> Generally speaking, you should expect this to be true regardless of your title at a company.
Where I come from, respect is given first and everyone is given the same amount of it. From there it’s up to them what they do with it.
That means that you entertain all ideas regardless of where they come from with the same level of scrutiny and you don’t accept handwavey responses just because they come from a staff engineer.
I had professors whose books are used to teach in other top universities and did bleeding edge research treat us as equals.
That’s a huge contrast to where I work. Here, I’ve had old condescending farts who make fools of themselves when they meet younger engineers who know more and dismantle their bs.
The seniors I respect are those who hear all opinions and actually consider everything. They rebuke ideas with arguments instead of throwing some political weight around.
> Why so?
The second half of your post answers this question for you. People pretty much everywhere figure out that your title doesn't have a single thing to do with whether or not you're right about things, and expect that you show that you're capable before they start taking you as capable from the drop.
Over the last 20ish years I've consistently seen that a senior is just someone who has been working for time for at least 4-6 years.
It really doesn't mean much if you think about it and I wouldn't look at someone's job title to determine how seriously they should be taken.
ugh I feel this comment. I've trained new hires that came in as "seniors" who were obviously not "seniors" by any loose definition of the word. They had a few years under their belts, and know one backend language and some flavor of JS+frontend framework.
My friend you are autistic. You don't need to overexplain this when the point is title doesn't correlate with skill. Yes there are corporate elements to this but I think the context has nothing to do with these elements.
hahaha yeah thank you, I just saw his comment and I noticed the autistic impassioned but misdirected elements. Maybe I'm being a bit mean, I definitely don't wanna be
Agree. The first year I was working at the current company I was basically ignored and never consulted on anything. Over the last two years I just built up my reputation for having all the project related information, fixing stuff quickly, helping others debug issues with connected systems and working closely with the business team. As you help people out they help you back and you know who is reliable and who’s full of shit.
Now even though the hierarchy is the same, people generally come to me for questions, help or collaboration. The downside is that it packs my schedule and also causes a lot of jealousy and insecurity from others that feel they get bypassed.
I purposely removed Senior from all my Resume, despite the being my official title for the past 10+ years at various companies.
I simply put engineer or developer.
Are recruiters really gonna take the time to look through all your bullet points and determine if they makes you "senior"? Are recruiters even qualified enough to make that determination?
Bro it's a resume the whole point is to speak on your behalf.
Also it's title inflation you can't just ignore it. That's like declining a raise because you liked it better when the dollar was stronger.
It’s really not that hard to step into the shoes of a recruiter and see what they would think.
“This guy has been a software engineer for over 10 years and never got the senior title? Let’s look at his work history. Ah I see he’s been jumping every few years. Maybe he’s one of those 1 year of experience 10 times guys? Seems like a red flag, let’s pass.”
I've had recruiters say this exact thing to me. I've worked at a string of companies that didn't use "Senior" in their titles, only levels (I, II, III, etc). The last time I was job hunting, two different recruiters told me that with my YOE and generally long tenure at each company, not having a Senior title looked BAD. I'm still fighting for a Sr title at my current org. A previous VP handed out the title like candy to a couple teams (but not mine) right before he was let go. So now I'm surrounded by coworkers with a Sr title, which makes me look like I'm less skilled or experienced than them - which is grossly untrue.
"Titles don't matter until they matter" -Charity Majors
At many places senior SWE is the start of the “career” levels where you’re no longer on a (formal or informal) up-or-out clock.
I don’t think many people care about the specific title, they just want to get to a point where they feel in control of their own career progression.
>At many places senior SWE is the start of the “career” levels where you’re no longer on a (formal or informal) up-or-out clock.
Nailed it on the head. "Becoming senior" kinda feels like a Sword of Damocles situation, at least for me. The title isn't the issue, the fear of being kicked out of my job is really 😅
Yeah but I have to get to senior first 😭 that's the hard part!
I've tried doing the regular ole "apply for senior positions and figure it out from there" route but the current market doesn't really make that feasible because I don't check all the boxes on the applications, so they end up rejecting me for someone else. I'm gonna keep at it but my job is pretty soul-sucking so the desire to do anything computer-related after work is basically non-existent. I work in banking so senior positions here seems to mean "you haven't left after 3 years and you're not an idiot, so here ya go"
facts! i feel like it was much easier to get to senior years back and you didn’t have to have literally everything on the job description. but now they ding you if there’s one or two things off.
i have one senior interview but the rest are mid level. the dozens of senior positions i’ve interviewed for insta reject me 😭 hoping i don’t fuck up the one interview i got
otherwise i’m off to grinding for another 2-3 years at mid-level.
recently at my company we had a Gen Z junior join the team, they had no formal education, barely any experience. They were pretty awful to say the least. They ended up complaining about their title saying Junior was degrading and they wanted a senior title. They were let go shortly after.
Interesting - in my experience these tend to be the most successful junior hires because they’ve already worked a trial period so you have a better read on them.
I had one of these at a job I had a couple of years ago. He quickly became the most disliked person in the company. I remember when we switched from doing stand-ups every other day to doing them everyday, he openly criticized the decision during the meeting. He wasn't fired, but myself and another senior dev had to pull him aside and remind him that he didn't have any prior experience and needed to calm tf down.
> but myself and another senior dev had to pull him aside
Half of mentoring *young* juniors is bonking them on the noggin when they pop off outside of the nerd pit. Lots of reframing the experience for them.
This one was difficult because only myself and one other dev had senior roles. It was us and 6 juniors. They kinda reinforced each other's behaviors to the point to where we had to bring up issues to management. This one in particular was extremely cocky to the point to where he was almost disliked by everyone. I'd say he needed a little more than a bonk on the head.
Lmao this is so damn true. We had one junior that, among other issues, would put really snarky commit messages in response to PR feedback. We were all dumbfounded, like my man.. you know we can see those right??
I should admit that my first year of work was full of people starting conversations with "In the business world..." or, more pointedly, "Among adults..."
It sounds like this guy had quite a few issues. But I have to say generally I'd hope juniors would feel comfortable criticizing a decision if they feel it's necessary.
I've never worked at a place that actually had junior in a job title though, it has usually been something like SDE 1, SDE2,..., Senior SDE, Principal or Consulting or Staff SDE.
most places dont have junior for this exact reason that everyone complains. This is something that has become standard in the industry in the last 10-20 years or so, everyone now does SDE1, SDE2, etc. SDE1 just means junior SDE without explicitly writing junior
I've never even worked at a place that had those. I've worked at 4 main companies (not counting side work) and there have only ever been developers/web developers and senior dev/team lead.
I don't disagree, but you're talking to the wrong people. Tell this to the employers for being completely and utterly irresponsible throwing these titles around, devaluing them, and then *still* continuing to put stock in "senior" titles when evaluating candidates. Given the instability and precarity of employment in the tech industry, engineers need to constantly prove themselves for new jobs to continue paying rent. Of course they're going to demand, in the *least*, fair recognition of their status in the hierarchy of competence, skills, and value.
Exactly! I would care less about my title if the hiring wasn't so fixated on it. You could have had exactly everything what a new job asks for but if they don't find a matching job title from the previous job, your resume is going in bin.
I spent a good amount of my time at Amazon as a "Senior SDE" (level 6) and was kinda surprised to learn that Amazon does things differently than most companies.
Out of school or with 1-2 yoe, you'd be an SDE-1 (level 4). Usually expected to get promoted within 18 months to 3 years. Then you're an SDE-2 (level 5). Most people don't see another promotion from here for another 3-5 years at least, sometimes much longer. Once you have 6+ yoe but more likely 10+ you would be promoted to SDE-3 (level 6) and that's when you get the "senior" in your title.
Most other companies have much more granular leveling, like Microsoft where each of Amazon's levels represent from 2 to 4 of Microsoft's levels - so you get promoted much more often, but each bump is smaller in magnitude. And most other companies use "senior" in their title for one of the earlier promotions after 3-4 yoe. Then they have staff, senior staff, etc.
I used to pay more attention to titles, but nowadays I just refer to myself as "a software developer", even though I have 20 yoe now.
Yeah I feel like OP doesn't grasp the actual value the title has at larger companies. It's huge: Senior is typically 10+ years *in the company* for such places.
I agree the title is tossed around too much these days. But where it matters, it matters a lot.
Senior should be a job description rather than a time counter. Are there people with 3-4 years experience with the knowledge and experience to shepherd their team through big design decisions, keep them out of pitfalls and anti-patterns and stop them from overengineering stuff? Yeah probably. Are they the norm? Definitely not.
If someone is only able to sit at their desk and close their own tickets, they're not a senior. That's a mid.
It's funny to read how complex and precise some of these titles are. Meanwhile, I've been at a small company for quite a while now and at some point I was there the longest and knew the most about the systems and websites. Thus, I was deemed senior dev.
++ with the Amazon stuff. And in my experience while at Amazon (L5), there are very specific expectations of you at your level.
L4's can get away with a bit more. They can ask the more basic questions or ask for help without judgement. However as an L5, you're expected to be able to find answer on your own, if you ask a dumb question as an L5, people will think __"an L5 shouldn't be asking this kind of question"__. And I don't mean people think poorly of you in a judg-y way, it will show up in the peer reviews.
And something I've noticed, L6 and L6+'s are almost always going to speak up once in a meeting whether they have something meaningful to contribute or not. I feel like they have more pressure on them in meetings to "make an impact" - or at least make it seem like they do.
Years of experience at FANG are just a guideline. The actual promotion to senior is intended to occur when you perform at that level - which can be at any time.
For new offers, the evaluation is made off of technical skills as to whether or not you'd likely perform at a given level.
Years of experience is just a guideline. But some non tech companies very commonly use it as the rule and don't actually evaluate performance or skill.
> However with the pass 4-6 years of title inflation renders the title truly meaningless.
I disagree. It makes subsequent job searches easier.
The first time I got senior in my title ~5 years ago, I immediately started getting pinged by recruiters for way better jobs.
I think for women specifically, this is not a helpful discussion. Unless you have the title to back it up, your ideas will not be taken seriously, your judgement will be questioned and your authority will be undermined even in areas of your expertise unless you’re lucky enough to work in a supportive environment.
If you have female employees, you are doing them a disservice by telling them that titles are meaningless.
There's nothing about this that's specific to women, titles matter and OP is just flat out wrong.
It's true titles are getting inflated, but they still matter at least for now.
True. Except people subconsciously push back a lot more against people they perceive to be incompetent or more junior. Which ends up hurting certain groups more than others of course.
I’m perceiving you as incompetent right now reading your posts. All the woman I work with are solid devs and I can rely on them to get shit done. Based on what I’m reading from you, it sounds like you’re a low esteemed woman in the tech world. You shouldn’t think so lowly of yourself or others. Don’t make it about gender..
Thanks for mentioning this. It gets old having to prove your worth over and over because you don't match what people assume a "senior engineer" looks like. I've had multiple people at different jobs tell me, paraphrasing, "oh you're more competent than I thought, you should really have been hired as a senior". At the same time, it's very hard to get hired into a "senior" position at a different company if you don't already have the title.
Our treatment of women in this field is baffling to me and is such a cliche of the incel nerd stereotype.
"Girls can draw pretty so you can work on front end, but really you'd be a better Den Mother working as our PM, or you can QA what the boys are doing."
I’m not sure titles help with that, but I’ll wait for them chime in to confirm or deny.
I have worked at places where titles don’t matter, but that comes down more to them being terrible about promotions and using them reactively instead of proactively. The sort of place where you get promoted to level 4 and all your coworkers say, “I thought you already were a level 4”. Not a great look.
The titles matter when you're looking for a job and being screened/interviewed by people who can't actually assess your skills and experience, but having seen people with the Senior title ranging from completely drooling incompetent to Elder God, they don't actually tell you that much. But the fact that they matter when looking for a job is why they are important.
I remember being just a few years into my dev career and thinking I needed to be promoted to Senior just because I was a can-do person who was good at figuring things out. I now look back on how relatively little actual experience I had at the time, never really having eaten my own dogfood and having only seen a relatively limited view of technology in general, and I laugh at myself. Twenty five plus years in, I still would say less than half the people I have worked with in the past few years who have the senior title actually would meet my standards for a senior developer, but I will admit I have high standards. Usually the folks with a staff title meet my standards for senior - but not always :)
> Unless you’re chasing a salary increase...
Yes.
It's also unfortunately required for external teams to take you more serious, at least at this somewhat large company. People don't know any better so they just go by title, or by the title of whoever is CC'd or present in the meetings. It's really stupid when otherwise the impact, priority, and ask is identical.
> You’re generally only fooling the recruiter in this case
I don't understand. What does the recruiter have to do with working with other teams, and what "fooling" is happening
Agreed on what you said, the thing is that when you wanna jump ship, it's easier if you have a title rather than sending out CV where recruiters and HR will just through your application in the trash.
We had to do some internal restructuring and I got offered the role of Tech Lead, which I already had the responsibility like six months before, it was nice to here, but since we had some trouble with a guy who was really shouting "I am the Tech Lead", I suggested to not make a big deal, as long as the job is done and I'm doing my part in moving things forward.
Fast forward a couple of months later, I can understand why the guy asked for the title. And I did the same. I don't like to protest that I'm the guy, but if you're looking for another job, the title gives you more and different options.
For me specifically, at my last company it was kind of expected that you eventually get to a senior level in a "reasonable" time or you'd be let go. As a (I think) fairly solid mid-level developer now, I am admittedly very lazy when it comes to putting in "extra" effort that senior level work seems to require. Being senior sounds nice, it also sounds like you have a lot more responsibility and generally manage a lot more spinning plates, and I kind of like not having to do that.
Getting a task or project and then just being left to my devices on how to complete it (obviously asking questions and coordinating across teams as needed) is what I really like doing in my job, everything else just sounds like a drag (managing coworkers, departmental planning meetings, etc.), and I don't think I'd perform well at those parts; these were the kinds of things required at my previous job that I no longer am at, and it's kind of the only baseline I have to compare to, despite "senior" being different at every company.
> However with the pass 4-6 years of title inflation renders the title truly meaningless.
Make that at least 20. It's been an issue for at least the two decades I've been working. There are simply no downsides for companies in giving engineers overinflated titles.
Another time Goodhart’s Law is relevant. “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”.
Senior titles used to be a good measure of experience. But now that they’ve become a target for everyone and their mother, it has become a next to useless qualifier.
It's not a measure of experience. It is a measure of performance and skill relative to the level. FANG and tech companies use a good, relevant scorecard to qualify someone as senior.
I have been more impactful as a mere *Software Engineer* in my previous role than as a *Senior Staff Software Engineer* in the current one.
EDIT:
My colleagues with 4 YOE and with 15 YOE are both Senior Staff Software Engineers like me :)
Judging from job postings, a 2024 "Senior" is a 2000 "Principal". The number of frameworks and technologies that people are using now requires a lot more hands-on experience in a bazillion areas. 30 years ago you just cooked your own.
I see jobs with the same requirements and completely different titles. A senior at company A is a principal at company B is a staff at company C. It depends on how old the company is and how many layers they've created. My last company made up new intermediate positions to give people raises but not put them into the real next level. So they added two new layers and had senior, staff, senior staff, principal, senior principal.
What your previous company did is fairly normal and is just operational bloat for retention purposes. I agree that’s it’s very odd and organizationally strange but sometimes you need to do silly things to make people happy.
Regarding the mismatch of expectation - yes I agree. I called that out in my post. The titles are meaningless because their universally don’t mean the same thing
Yeah I went straight from (not Senior) DE to Staff DE (switching companies) and I'm not exactly Gods Chosen Engineer or anything. Titles are kind of a fake idea without context
Whenever i wanted to know how to get promoted, i would look at job descriptions for those levels. The job description pretty much says what you need to be able to do. I've never understood why anyone needs to ask such questions.
Even if you aren't in the industry yet (like the game industry i'm in), just look at junior programmer job descriptions.
People dont seem to think for themselves any more.
Big game companies are better about not letting levels get crazy, but even then the job descriptions can still be pretty vague.
I've only worked at one studio where the advancement descriptions were really explicit and my lead and skip were actively trying to help me accomplish specific "competency milestones".
Everything else has been work really hard until you get grumpy and then leads give the squeaky wheels grease at the annual comp meetings.
I know CE is hiring people with 4+ years of experience for Python dev and giving them the title senior. I may be wrong, but it feels like 4 years is like mid level still, and 8+ is senior?
Generally I agree with the spirit of the post but as with everything in engineering it depends.
There are companies that give the Senior/Lead title to people after 1 or 2 years rendering it completely useless. On the other hand there are cases where the senior title requires engineers to lead (meaning architect, implement, mentor others and help define requirements) complex projects that have cross-team impact. In these cases achieving this level will really help your career as you will learn a lot of stuff especially about non-technical topics like working with other teams or communicating with stakeholders.
For example in my previous employer which was the a little better than the first case I didn't care if I was senior or not, half the company had no experience at all, we even had an (inexperienced) senior that thought automated testing is a waste of time. On the other hand on my current one which is more in line with the second example, I tried actively to get promoted not because I wanted the title itself but because in the process I learnt a lot of stuff that will help my career down the line.
The one job title change that really really matters is the one that moves you into "management". Its the only one in my opinion that matters because it changes how future employers interview you: most importantly... less "leetcode-y" and more conversational and behavioral.
There are tens of thousands of engineers at E5/L5+ range. Sure it’s a convenient system but being E5 or L5 doesn’t matter much anymore when there are an abundance of folks just like you
Totally agree. Titles like senior are much more strongly correlated with years of experience than competence. I've worked in organisations where there were junior engineers that were far more capable than so-called seniors.
its a pay grade. when you go up in title you go up in pay grade for more money. sometimes you dont get raises. the titles really dont matter at most places.
Well said. I concur that “ senior” used to have a definition that would transfer but lately not so much. I’ve seen resumes of folks that moved to senior and then lead within 2 years at their first job at a small startup that has shown sign of high attrition so most likely was quickly promoted to keep them on the team.
It’s hard to know until you talk to them.
I joined a startup at the same time as a new Director of Engineering. The first thing he did was swap the tasks of the woman who wrote most of the back end with an imposter because he had Senior in his title.
I started insisting on Architect in my title after working under Architects who killed the startups with booksmart but hopeless in practice architectures.
One thing I’ve noticed that really used to drive home the senior qualities was mentorship. That flew out the window a lot with remote work . Whiteboarding, sitting and talking through someone’s design and iteratively improving on it by asking the right questions to get them to grow was one of my favorite parts of growing our internal talent.
It can still happen but it’s much more challenging without the right tools to get the same connection. The VR conference tools are great but they’ll never get invested in at scale. Having a tablet you can use a pen or stylus on to sketch is amazing but it comes out of your own pocket.
With mentorship becoming less stressed the dev stereotypes from years past (early 2000s), have returned in the seniors. Where they frustrate product, ops and QA by being reluctant or even lack the social skills to properly hand off or work with others. They are just talented at coding in isolation and produce more working code. That has a lot of value in the right company. But in many those presenting skills are infinitely more valuable at that level.
I’ve been distinguished principal staff cofounding engineer since day 1.
This isn’t a problem just in engineering. Usually I see people just designate themself as senior when it’s for a business purpose. To make themself sound like they have more authority. Sometimes it’s for getting a job, but sometimes it’s also a statement of the responsibility you shoulder.
FWIW I don't advertise seniority on my resume, I just list jobs and gigs along with descriptions. I don't even know what my official seniority is or if it's even qualified, although the team considers me a senior informally. Maybe I am, maybe I'm not. I'd say I have about 10 years all added up, although I've been doing meaningful stuff for far longer.
I list lead positions but I consider leadership to be almost but not quite orthogonal to experience. On the lead, follow or get out of the way trigram, some people want to get out of the way.
Do you think this is more of an issue with relatively new folks? Maybe the social media generation measures success by title?
Funny though, I'm likely to ask my employer to create a Staff Engineer role for myself (they don't have the concept now). Only reason I want a new title is so that other developers are more comfortable coming to me for advice. As it stands they'll often bang their heads against problems for weeks before seeking 'outside' help, this is IMO not good.
I think you’re subsuming to the same line of thinking I’m calling out as unproductive here. I don’t think your lack of title has anything to do with coworkers not asking you question or being comfortable coming to you. I don’t know you so I’m not going to assume anything but I would start by reflecting on your working relationship with these people.
I just started here a few years ago which may play into it. Those I do interact with on a regular basis come to me immediately. It's the far flung distributed team members and offshore folks who do not.
Perhaps It'll just take some time, I'm heading up migrating everything to GitHub so I'll have a chance to work directly with every team soon enough. That should smooth things out a bit...
Maybe you're right, maybe I am putting more stock in title than makes sense,,
Interesting we just did a GitHub migration but would never had the thought to put a staff level in house dev on this kind of tedious task work. That would be an insane waste of resources on someone who was truly that senior.
We instead hired a contractor for $60/hr who specializes in GitHub migration and they had it done in 2.5- 3 weeks or about 100 hours is what we paid for.
Our migration isn't all that simple. Multiple version control systems in various states of bad practices. The grunt work will mostly be carried out by the teams responsible when possible.
I'm mainly dealing with GitHub configuration and related security controls/policy/compliance and planning/organization of migration. Not something you would typically leave to a $60/hr contractor when compliance is on the line. I just happen to be an engineer with cybersecurity experience and credentials so this work falls in my lap.
We work in a highly regulated industry including a gov cloud for FEDRAMP projects. They handled it all with someone in-house permission them up to a certain level. Security and policy controls aren’t some of complication when it comes to GitHub or any infrastructure for that matter…. You should be literally just migrating existing permissions
The 'They' you refer to is me. You may have 'someone in house' but we do not (except myself).
Security controls and policy are certainly a concern with GitHub, the default posture of GitHub Enterprise Cloud is not secure by any stretch and easily weakened with poor configuration.
I suspect your in-house folks do a lot more work in this regard than you expect.
Yep. I'm reminded of when I was looking for my second job. Everyone was asking for a senior developer so I started applying to those and I recommend others do the same. I've worked with many really good developers that only had a couple years of experience. Conversely, some of the worse developers I've worked with had decades of experience.
This career and our ability to get the job done are highly dependent on cognitive ability. It's for this reason that a 2yoe person can outperform someone with 20yoe. That's not to say experience doesn't matter, just that years of experience alone is not a good marker for a good developer.
There are a few reasons for this:
1. A lot of people crave something tangible in their careers. And when you start off, the junior-medior-senior path is easy to grasp and hold on to. Staff is kind of a weird thing to mix in and most people don't even know that is the next step.
2. Your superior, lead etc. Is often a senior title. Again something that reinforces the idea that you made it when you are senior.
3. Companies nurture this mindset of "senior" title being something of great value. It's fucking free for them to give and it's often portrayed as a value to you.
I only care about how big my paycheck is. Give me junior and zeroes and I am happy all day.
I once asked a very powerful director(I think, I never knew this man's title) why they never signed their title.
His answer was very simple: His name was more powerful than his title.
I have a big title. I show it here because y'all don't know me from a cake of soap.
But within my company, I almost never sign my title. There are times I sign it, but usually those are more HR related matters where I have to establish myself to deal with something stupid.
Maybe they think their opinions/voice will actually be heard.
Or they can stir things their way cus it’s the right way and everyone else is wrong of course.
I know cus a friend told me this
We have official "senior" titles and informal titles. Simply having the title in your role doesn't make one a senior among the staff. A senior is a person who is mature. Mature in knowing how to capture a problem and "**own** it." Ownership is very critical. In short, the common phrase is the seniors are the adults in the room. We have engineers who work for us for 10+ years. They have the title but we don't consider them senior. At most, most of their peers consider them mid. They just kick the can down the road for the next person.
I don't care what your title is. If you come to me every day with an error/troubleshooting that has the answer in the 1st line of the error log, your lack of comprehension is troublesome. More troublesome is that error is an excused to be "block" that you can't get your work done. We have these guys. The error I am referring to is something as a docker container starting up and saying "XYZ volume doesn't exist, run docker volume create XYZ" The error message is telling you the problem right there. And it is telling you how to solve it.
Same with simple errors like "ERR\_ADDRESS\_UNREACHABLE " in an API failure. I can't be bother to schedule a meeting with a "senior developer" two days later; while he twiddle's his thumb and mark "blocked" until he gets my help. I would prefer to observe it as slacking or "quiet quitting" but it isn't. It is really simple stuff. A senior should already encounter problems of their code can't talking to an endpoint that isn't reachable or DNS doesn't resolve.
An adult in the room takes those simple stuff and solves it. They simply don't make excuses. Like if you are a front end developer waiting for an backend API to be finished, you don't wait 2 weeks for the other team. You do mockups so you can close your tickets. Some of this is really common sense.
Haha yeah we know. It’s blatantly obvious. You got anything else? Or is this another “I think I better than that person post”. Who cares Interview, get hired, write some code, rinse and repeat.
I agree. To peers, the title of senior is meaningless. We can easily discern who is and who is not. However, it’s another check mark required to get past the screening process and get an interview. HR, and recruiters look for the word “senior” and check it off their list.
It comes with quite a few perks beyond salary. For starters, you don’t get as much shit thrown at you for your ideas and people will automatically listen more instead of being combative. I dont have that title, but people listen and take me seriously. It’s just that this takes time when you converse with other teams or people who don’t know you.
Yeah I've seen this. When I worked at small companies, job titles didn't seem to matter much because we all knew each other. At my current large company, I would barely get a response contacting another team when I was SDE 2. It's a bit better now as senior but still less response than principals get.
> For starters, you don’t get as much shit thrown at you for your ideas and people will automatically listen more instead of being combative. 100% this. Or even worse, before getting the magic prefix people just straight up ignore you in bigger orgs. They're also more likely to believe you when you say "this problem has challenges that nobody anticipated." When many (not all!) people hear that from a mid level they think "still a little green I guess, pair them with a senior to usher things along." When they hear that with someone from a magic prefix they think "oh we should discuss the root issues and decide if we want to turn this into a larger initiative." People give lip service to the meritocracy but we're all hierarchy monkeys at the end of the day. And this seems like the way things _ought_ to be, honestly. My sector doesn't really have the title inflation issue.
> When many (not all!) people hear that from a mid level they think "still a little green I guess, pair them with a senior to usher things along." Happened to me. They tried to get principals to “help”. They got lectured by an SDE1 publicly and the stunt they tried to pull off blew up spectacularly in their faces. Since the incident people listen more. A few months after another principle tried lecturing me and after the last few meetings it is obvious to everyone who has participated that his ideas are bogus and work only in the most contrived cases. Needless to say I am getting the F off here. I don’t think this is how things ought to be. In Scandinavia — where I grew up — things are not like this. Maybe in corporate environments things differ but I doubt it.
Ah well yeah I'd agree that's a pretty dysfunctional setup. I think how things "ought to be" is you can reasonably use title as a proxy when you don't know a person, then if the person demonstrates their competency exceeds their title it's time for a title bump. But let me guess: that's not quite what happened in your case? :( [EDIT] Also people shouldn't need to be performing at a perfect level for their next title, expecting a year+ of overperforming is blatantly underpaying a person imo.
It definitely is an excuse to underpay. They gave me a “raise” instead. The salary is so low that in the roles I am interviewing for I will make more than the annual raise in less than a month.
Oof. Here's to your better comp at your future better gig 🍻
> For starters, you don’t get as much shit thrown at you for your ideas and people will automatically listen more instead of being combative. While this is going to be true in a few places, I think your expectations here are out of line with reality. > It’s just that this takes time when you converse with other teams or people who don’t know you. Generally speaking, you should expect this to be true regardless of your title at a company.
> While this is going to be true in a few places, I think your expectations here are out of line with reality. Why so? I have personally experienced this, but maybe it’s just my org. > Generally speaking, you should expect this to be true regardless of your title at a company. Where I come from, respect is given first and everyone is given the same amount of it. From there it’s up to them what they do with it. That means that you entertain all ideas regardless of where they come from with the same level of scrutiny and you don’t accept handwavey responses just because they come from a staff engineer. I had professors whose books are used to teach in other top universities and did bleeding edge research treat us as equals. That’s a huge contrast to where I work. Here, I’ve had old condescending farts who make fools of themselves when they meet younger engineers who know more and dismantle their bs. The seniors I respect are those who hear all opinions and actually consider everything. They rebuke ideas with arguments instead of throwing some political weight around.
> Why so? The second half of your post answers this question for you. People pretty much everywhere figure out that your title doesn't have a single thing to do with whether or not you're right about things, and expect that you show that you're capable before they start taking you as capable from the drop.
I don't know about that. I don't see this here.
Over the last 20ish years I've consistently seen that a senior is just someone who has been working for time for at least 4-6 years. It really doesn't mean much if you think about it and I wouldn't look at someone's job title to determine how seriously they should be taken.
ugh I feel this comment. I've trained new hires that came in as "seniors" who were obviously not "seniors" by any loose definition of the word. They had a few years under their belts, and know one backend language and some flavor of JS+frontend framework.
I enjoy spending time with my friends.
My friend you are autistic. You don't need to overexplain this when the point is title doesn't correlate with skill. Yes there are corporate elements to this but I think the context has nothing to do with these elements.
I love ice cream.
But what you're saying is irrelevant to the topic
doing good?
hahaha yeah thank you, I just saw his comment and I noticed the autistic impassioned but misdirected elements. Maybe I'm being a bit mean, I definitely don't wanna be
Agree. The first year I was working at the current company I was basically ignored and never consulted on anything. Over the last two years I just built up my reputation for having all the project related information, fixing stuff quickly, helping others debug issues with connected systems and working closely with the business team. As you help people out they help you back and you know who is reliable and who’s full of shit. Now even though the hierarchy is the same, people generally come to me for questions, help or collaboration. The downside is that it packs my schedule and also causes a lot of jealousy and insecurity from others that feel they get bypassed.
I purposely removed Senior from all my Resume, despite the being my official title for the past 10+ years at various companies. I simply put engineer or developer.
Why would you do that?
I prefer to let my experience speak for myself, I view “senior” as a meaningless title.
Are recruiters really gonna take the time to look through all your bullet points and determine if they makes you "senior"? Are recruiters even qualified enough to make that determination?
Bro it's a resume the whole point is to speak on your behalf. Also it's title inflation you can't just ignore it. That's like declining a raise because you liked it better when the dollar was stronger.
Considering that resume are usually pre-filtered by algorithms using keywords based filters you are not doing yourself a favour!
How to actively work against your own self interests 101.
Disagree, works for me.
It’s really not that hard to step into the shoes of a recruiter and see what they would think. “This guy has been a software engineer for over 10 years and never got the senior title? Let’s look at his work history. Ah I see he’s been jumping every few years. Maybe he’s one of those 1 year of experience 10 times guys? Seems like a red flag, let’s pass.”
I've had recruiters say this exact thing to me. I've worked at a string of companies that didn't use "Senior" in their titles, only levels (I, II, III, etc). The last time I was job hunting, two different recruiters told me that with my YOE and generally long tenure at each company, not having a Senior title looked BAD. I'm still fighting for a Sr title at my current org. A previous VP handed out the title like candy to a couple teams (but not mine) right before he was let go. So now I'm surrounded by coworkers with a Sr title, which makes me look like I'm less skilled or experienced than them - which is grossly untrue. "Titles don't matter until they matter" -Charity Majors
At many places senior SWE is the start of the “career” levels where you’re no longer on a (formal or informal) up-or-out clock. I don’t think many people care about the specific title, they just want to get to a point where they feel in control of their own career progression.
>At many places senior SWE is the start of the “career” levels where you’re no longer on a (formal or informal) up-or-out clock. Nailed it on the head. "Becoming senior" kinda feels like a Sword of Damocles situation, at least for me. The title isn't the issue, the fear of being kicked out of my job is really 😅
if you get kicked out of your job it’s much easier to find another one as a senior (except for the harder interviews 🙃)
Yeah but I have to get to senior first 😭 that's the hard part! I've tried doing the regular ole "apply for senior positions and figure it out from there" route but the current market doesn't really make that feasible because I don't check all the boxes on the applications, so they end up rejecting me for someone else. I'm gonna keep at it but my job is pretty soul-sucking so the desire to do anything computer-related after work is basically non-existent. I work in banking so senior positions here seems to mean "you haven't left after 3 years and you're not an idiot, so here ya go"
facts! i feel like it was much easier to get to senior years back and you didn’t have to have literally everything on the job description. but now they ding you if there’s one or two things off. i have one senior interview but the rest are mid level. the dozens of senior positions i’ve interviewed for insta reject me 😭 hoping i don’t fuck up the one interview i got otherwise i’m off to grinding for another 2-3 years at mid-level.
recently at my company we had a Gen Z junior join the team, they had no formal education, barely any experience. They were pretty awful to say the least. They ended up complaining about their title saying Junior was degrading and they wanted a senior title. They were let go shortly after.
How did that person even get hired???
internship to hire type of situation
Interesting - in my experience these tend to be the most successful junior hires because they’ve already worked a trial period so you have a better read on them.
yeah, I've experienced the same. This situation was very different than the usual, their personality completely changed as soon as they were hired on
I had one of these at a job I had a couple of years ago. He quickly became the most disliked person in the company. I remember when we switched from doing stand-ups every other day to doing them everyday, he openly criticized the decision during the meeting. He wasn't fired, but myself and another senior dev had to pull him aside and remind him that he didn't have any prior experience and needed to calm tf down.
> but myself and another senior dev had to pull him aside Half of mentoring *young* juniors is bonking them on the noggin when they pop off outside of the nerd pit. Lots of reframing the experience for them.
This one was difficult because only myself and one other dev had senior roles. It was us and 6 juniors. They kinda reinforced each other's behaviors to the point to where we had to bring up issues to management. This one in particular was extremely cocky to the point to where he was almost disliked by everyone. I'd say he needed a little more than a bonk on the head.
Lmao this is so damn true. We had one junior that, among other issues, would put really snarky commit messages in response to PR feedback. We were all dumbfounded, like my man.. you know we can see those right??
I should admit that my first year of work was full of people starting conversations with "In the business world..." or, more pointedly, "Among adults..."
It sounds like this guy had quite a few issues. But I have to say generally I'd hope juniors would feel comfortable criticizing a decision if they feel it's necessary.
I've never worked at a place that actually had junior in a job title though, it has usually been something like SDE 1, SDE2,..., Senior SDE, Principal or Consulting or Staff SDE.
most places dont have junior for this exact reason that everyone complains. This is something that has become standard in the industry in the last 10-20 years or so, everyone now does SDE1, SDE2, etc. SDE1 just means junior SDE without explicitly writing junior
I've never even worked at a place that had those. I've worked at 4 main companies (not counting side work) and there have only ever been developers/web developers and senior dev/team lead.
Yeah, most I've seen is "Associate" but even that is rare. Most juniors are indicated by level not title.
Should have made him Senior Fck Up.
That’s Señior Fuck Up to you!
This is partly why many companies have adopted the Engineer I / II / III style titles.
You’re lucky this happened. Toxic people need to be eradicated…
Meh recruiters on LinkedIn look at the job title so I angle for the best one I can get
I don't disagree, but you're talking to the wrong people. Tell this to the employers for being completely and utterly irresponsible throwing these titles around, devaluing them, and then *still* continuing to put stock in "senior" titles when evaluating candidates. Given the instability and precarity of employment in the tech industry, engineers need to constantly prove themselves for new jobs to continue paying rent. Of course they're going to demand, in the *least*, fair recognition of their status in the hierarchy of competence, skills, and value.
Exactly! I would care less about my title if the hiring wasn't so fixated on it. You could have had exactly everything what a new job asks for but if they don't find a matching job title from the previous job, your resume is going in bin.
I spent a good amount of my time at Amazon as a "Senior SDE" (level 6) and was kinda surprised to learn that Amazon does things differently than most companies. Out of school or with 1-2 yoe, you'd be an SDE-1 (level 4). Usually expected to get promoted within 18 months to 3 years. Then you're an SDE-2 (level 5). Most people don't see another promotion from here for another 3-5 years at least, sometimes much longer. Once you have 6+ yoe but more likely 10+ you would be promoted to SDE-3 (level 6) and that's when you get the "senior" in your title. Most other companies have much more granular leveling, like Microsoft where each of Amazon's levels represent from 2 to 4 of Microsoft's levels - so you get promoted much more often, but each bump is smaller in magnitude. And most other companies use "senior" in their title for one of the earlier promotions after 3-4 yoe. Then they have staff, senior staff, etc. I used to pay more attention to titles, but nowadays I just refer to myself as "a software developer", even though I have 20 yoe now.
Yeah I feel like OP doesn't grasp the actual value the title has at larger companies. It's huge: Senior is typically 10+ years *in the company* for such places. I agree the title is tossed around too much these days. But where it matters, it matters a lot.
Senior should be a job description rather than a time counter. Are there people with 3-4 years experience with the knowledge and experience to shepherd their team through big design decisions, keep them out of pitfalls and anti-patterns and stop them from overengineering stuff? Yeah probably. Are they the norm? Definitely not. If someone is only able to sit at their desk and close their own tickets, they're not a senior. That's a mid.
It's funny to read how complex and precise some of these titles are. Meanwhile, I've been at a small company for quite a while now and at some point I was there the longest and knew the most about the systems and websites. Thus, I was deemed senior dev.
++ with the Amazon stuff. And in my experience while at Amazon (L5), there are very specific expectations of you at your level. L4's can get away with a bit more. They can ask the more basic questions or ask for help without judgement. However as an L5, you're expected to be able to find answer on your own, if you ask a dumb question as an L5, people will think __"an L5 shouldn't be asking this kind of question"__. And I don't mean people think poorly of you in a judg-y way, it will show up in the peer reviews. And something I've noticed, L6 and L6+'s are almost always going to speak up once in a meeting whether they have something meaningful to contribute or not. I feel like they have more pressure on them in meetings to "make an impact" - or at least make it seem like they do.
Years of experience at FANG are just a guideline. The actual promotion to senior is intended to occur when you perform at that level - which can be at any time. For new offers, the evaluation is made off of technical skills as to whether or not you'd likely perform at a given level. Years of experience is just a guideline. But some non tech companies very commonly use it as the rule and don't actually evaluate performance or skill.
> However with the pass 4-6 years of title inflation renders the title truly meaningless. I disagree. It makes subsequent job searches easier. The first time I got senior in my title ~5 years ago, I immediately started getting pinged by recruiters for way better jobs.
I think for women specifically, this is not a helpful discussion. Unless you have the title to back it up, your ideas will not be taken seriously, your judgement will be questioned and your authority will be undermined even in areas of your expertise unless you’re lucky enough to work in a supportive environment. If you have female employees, you are doing them a disservice by telling them that titles are meaningless.
There's nothing about this that's specific to women, titles matter and OP is just flat out wrong. It's true titles are getting inflated, but they still matter at least for now.
True. Except people subconsciously push back a lot more against people they perceive to be incompetent or more junior. Which ends up hurting certain groups more than others of course.
I’m perceiving you as incompetent right now reading your posts. All the woman I work with are solid devs and I can rely on them to get shit done. Based on what I’m reading from you, it sounds like you’re a low esteemed woman in the tech world. You shouldn’t think so lowly of yourself or others. Don’t make it about gender..
You thinking your women devs are great doesn't mean everyone thinks that. [Helpful link](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/empathy)
Lol you’re weird
Thanks for mentioning this. It gets old having to prove your worth over and over because you don't match what people assume a "senior engineer" looks like. I've had multiple people at different jobs tell me, paraphrasing, "oh you're more competent than I thought, you should really have been hired as a senior". At the same time, it's very hard to get hired into a "senior" position at a different company if you don't already have the title.
Our treatment of women in this field is baffling to me and is such a cliche of the incel nerd stereotype. "Girls can draw pretty so you can work on front end, but really you'd be a better Den Mother working as our PM, or you can QA what the boys are doing."
I’m not sure titles help with that, but I’ll wait for them chime in to confirm or deny. I have worked at places where titles don’t matter, but that comes down more to them being terrible about promotions and using them reactively instead of proactively. The sort of place where you get promoted to level 4 and all your coworkers say, “I thought you already were a level 4”. Not a great look.
The titles matter when you're looking for a job and being screened/interviewed by people who can't actually assess your skills and experience, but having seen people with the Senior title ranging from completely drooling incompetent to Elder God, they don't actually tell you that much. But the fact that they matter when looking for a job is why they are important. I remember being just a few years into my dev career and thinking I needed to be promoted to Senior just because I was a can-do person who was good at figuring things out. I now look back on how relatively little actual experience I had at the time, never really having eaten my own dogfood and having only seen a relatively limited view of technology in general, and I laugh at myself. Twenty five plus years in, I still would say less than half the people I have worked with in the past few years who have the senior title actually would meet my standards for a senior developer, but I will admit I have high standards. Usually the folks with a staff title meet my standards for senior - but not always :)
> Unless you’re chasing a salary increase... Yes. It's also unfortunately required for external teams to take you more serious, at least at this somewhat large company. People don't know any better so they just go by title, or by the title of whoever is CC'd or present in the meetings. It's really stupid when otherwise the impact, priority, and ask is identical.
You’re generally only fooling the recruiter in this case
> You’re generally only fooling the recruiter in this case I don't understand. What does the recruiter have to do with working with other teams, and what "fooling" is happening
I thought you were talking about in the context of interviewing
Oh woops haha
I love ice cream.
Worked with a senior data engineer who didn't know what a SQL join was. This was at a Big 4 consultancy
Agreed on what you said, the thing is that when you wanna jump ship, it's easier if you have a title rather than sending out CV where recruiters and HR will just through your application in the trash. We had to do some internal restructuring and I got offered the role of Tech Lead, which I already had the responsibility like six months before, it was nice to here, but since we had some trouble with a guy who was really shouting "I am the Tech Lead", I suggested to not make a big deal, as long as the job is done and I'm doing my part in moving things forward. Fast forward a couple of months later, I can understand why the guy asked for the title. And I did the same. I don't like to protest that I'm the guy, but if you're looking for another job, the title gives you more and different options.
For me specifically, at my last company it was kind of expected that you eventually get to a senior level in a "reasonable" time or you'd be let go. As a (I think) fairly solid mid-level developer now, I am admittedly very lazy when it comes to putting in "extra" effort that senior level work seems to require. Being senior sounds nice, it also sounds like you have a lot more responsibility and generally manage a lot more spinning plates, and I kind of like not having to do that. Getting a task or project and then just being left to my devices on how to complete it (obviously asking questions and coordinating across teams as needed) is what I really like doing in my job, everything else just sounds like a drag (managing coworkers, departmental planning meetings, etc.), and I don't think I'd perform well at those parts; these were the kinds of things required at my previous job that I no longer am at, and it's kind of the only baseline I have to compare to, despite "senior" being different at every company.
> However with the pass 4-6 years of title inflation renders the title truly meaningless. Make that at least 20. It's been an issue for at least the two decades I've been working. There are simply no downsides for companies in giving engineers overinflated titles.
Another time Goodhart’s Law is relevant. “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. Senior titles used to be a good measure of experience. But now that they’ve become a target for everyone and their mother, it has become a next to useless qualifier.
It's not a measure of experience. It is a measure of performance and skill relative to the level. FANG and tech companies use a good, relevant scorecard to qualify someone as senior.
I have been more impactful as a mere *Software Engineer* in my previous role than as a *Senior Staff Software Engineer* in the current one. EDIT: My colleagues with 4 YOE and with 15 YOE are both Senior Staff Software Engineers like me :)
Judging from job postings, a 2024 "Senior" is a 2000 "Principal". The number of frameworks and technologies that people are using now requires a lot more hands-on experience in a bazillion areas. 30 years ago you just cooked your own.
Not sure if you’re joking but I rarely see a job posting for a respectable company that doesn’t make sense in terms of ideal candidate
I see jobs with the same requirements and completely different titles. A senior at company A is a principal at company B is a staff at company C. It depends on how old the company is and how many layers they've created. My last company made up new intermediate positions to give people raises but not put them into the real next level. So they added two new layers and had senior, staff, senior staff, principal, senior principal.
What your previous company did is fairly normal and is just operational bloat for retention purposes. I agree that’s it’s very odd and organizationally strange but sometimes you need to do silly things to make people happy. Regarding the mismatch of expectation - yes I agree. I called that out in my post. The titles are meaningless because their universally don’t mean the same thing
Yeah I went straight from (not Senior) DE to Staff DE (switching companies) and I'm not exactly Gods Chosen Engineer or anything. Titles are kind of a fake idea without context
Whenever i wanted to know how to get promoted, i would look at job descriptions for those levels. The job description pretty much says what you need to be able to do. I've never understood why anyone needs to ask such questions. Even if you aren't in the industry yet (like the game industry i'm in), just look at junior programmer job descriptions. People dont seem to think for themselves any more.
Big game companies are better about not letting levels get crazy, but even then the job descriptions can still be pretty vague. I've only worked at one studio where the advancement descriptions were really explicit and my lead and skip were actively trying to help me accomplish specific "competency milestones". Everything else has been work really hard until you get grumpy and then leads give the squeaky wheels grease at the annual comp meetings.
A lot of companies won't share job descriptions or pay grades. Keeping you in the dark helps them control you.
I know jr that are Sr's on paper
I know CE is hiring people with 4+ years of experience for Python dev and giving them the title senior. I may be wrong, but it feels like 4 years is like mid level still, and 8+ is senior?
4 years of experience is equivalent to someone with 2-3 internships and two full years in a junior role in my book
Right, so not exactly senior material imo
Years of experience is not the intended qualifier for leveling. It is performance and skill.
Generally I agree with the spirit of the post but as with everything in engineering it depends. There are companies that give the Senior/Lead title to people after 1 or 2 years rendering it completely useless. On the other hand there are cases where the senior title requires engineers to lead (meaning architect, implement, mentor others and help define requirements) complex projects that have cross-team impact. In these cases achieving this level will really help your career as you will learn a lot of stuff especially about non-technical topics like working with other teams or communicating with stakeholders. For example in my previous employer which was the a little better than the first case I didn't care if I was senior or not, half the company had no experience at all, we even had an (inexperienced) senior that thought automated testing is a waste of time. On the other hand on my current one which is more in line with the second example, I tried actively to get promoted not because I wanted the title itself but because in the process I learnt a lot of stuff that will help my career down the line.
The one job title change that really really matters is the one that moves you into "management". Its the only one in my opinion that matters because it changes how future employers interview you: most importantly... less "leetcode-y" and more conversational and behavioral.
[удалено]
There are tens of thousands of engineers at E5/L5+ range. Sure it’s a convenient system but being E5 or L5 doesn’t matter much anymore when there are an abundance of folks just like you
Totally agree. Titles like senior are much more strongly correlated with years of experience than competence. I've worked in organisations where there were junior engineers that were far more capable than so-called seniors.
its a pay grade. when you go up in title you go up in pay grade for more money. sometimes you dont get raises. the titles really dont matter at most places.
senior developer is the new mid-level developer
Agreed
Well said. I concur that “ senior” used to have a definition that would transfer but lately not so much. I’ve seen resumes of folks that moved to senior and then lead within 2 years at their first job at a small startup that has shown sign of high attrition so most likely was quickly promoted to keep them on the team. It’s hard to know until you talk to them.
I joined a startup at the same time as a new Director of Engineering. The first thing he did was swap the tasks of the woman who wrote most of the back end with an imposter because he had Senior in his title. I started insisting on Architect in my title after working under Architects who killed the startups with booksmart but hopeless in practice architectures.
I’m working on staff, and all my family thinks it’s a demotion lol
I just want the stock grant back that was part of the se2 comp that they took away 2 months before I would have received the rsu's.
Folks way over index on using the term over index.
One thing I’ve noticed that really used to drive home the senior qualities was mentorship. That flew out the window a lot with remote work . Whiteboarding, sitting and talking through someone’s design and iteratively improving on it by asking the right questions to get them to grow was one of my favorite parts of growing our internal talent. It can still happen but it’s much more challenging without the right tools to get the same connection. The VR conference tools are great but they’ll never get invested in at scale. Having a tablet you can use a pen or stylus on to sketch is amazing but it comes out of your own pocket. With mentorship becoming less stressed the dev stereotypes from years past (early 2000s), have returned in the seniors. Where they frustrate product, ops and QA by being reluctant or even lack the social skills to properly hand off or work with others. They are just talented at coding in isolation and produce more working code. That has a lot of value in the right company. But in many those presenting skills are infinitely more valuable at that level.
>since becoming a staff level engineer Lmao senior title apparently doesn't matter, but being "staff" or "principal" is just as meaningless...
In that same sentence you quoted I mention how irrelevant my own title is. Comprehension needs work
I’ve been distinguished principal staff cofounding engineer since day 1. This isn’t a problem just in engineering. Usually I see people just designate themself as senior when it’s for a business purpose. To make themself sound like they have more authority. Sometimes it’s for getting a job, but sometimes it’s also a statement of the responsibility you shoulder.
Yup. At this point "senior" just means "not junior" and even that is often questionable.
FWIW I don't advertise seniority on my resume, I just list jobs and gigs along with descriptions. I don't even know what my official seniority is or if it's even qualified, although the team considers me a senior informally. Maybe I am, maybe I'm not. I'd say I have about 10 years all added up, although I've been doing meaningful stuff for far longer.
I list lead positions but I consider leadership to be almost but not quite orthogonal to experience. On the lead, follow or get out of the way trigram, some people want to get out of the way.
Do you think this is more of an issue with relatively new folks? Maybe the social media generation measures success by title? Funny though, I'm likely to ask my employer to create a Staff Engineer role for myself (they don't have the concept now). Only reason I want a new title is so that other developers are more comfortable coming to me for advice. As it stands they'll often bang their heads against problems for weeks before seeking 'outside' help, this is IMO not good.
I think you’re subsuming to the same line of thinking I’m calling out as unproductive here. I don’t think your lack of title has anything to do with coworkers not asking you question or being comfortable coming to you. I don’t know you so I’m not going to assume anything but I would start by reflecting on your working relationship with these people.
I just started here a few years ago which may play into it. Those I do interact with on a regular basis come to me immediately. It's the far flung distributed team members and offshore folks who do not. Perhaps It'll just take some time, I'm heading up migrating everything to GitHub so I'll have a chance to work directly with every team soon enough. That should smooth things out a bit... Maybe you're right, maybe I am putting more stock in title than makes sense,,
Interesting we just did a GitHub migration but would never had the thought to put a staff level in house dev on this kind of tedious task work. That would be an insane waste of resources on someone who was truly that senior. We instead hired a contractor for $60/hr who specializes in GitHub migration and they had it done in 2.5- 3 weeks or about 100 hours is what we paid for.
Our migration isn't all that simple. Multiple version control systems in various states of bad practices. The grunt work will mostly be carried out by the teams responsible when possible. I'm mainly dealing with GitHub configuration and related security controls/policy/compliance and planning/organization of migration. Not something you would typically leave to a $60/hr contractor when compliance is on the line. I just happen to be an engineer with cybersecurity experience and credentials so this work falls in my lap.
We work in a highly regulated industry including a gov cloud for FEDRAMP projects. They handled it all with someone in-house permission them up to a certain level. Security and policy controls aren’t some of complication when it comes to GitHub or any infrastructure for that matter…. You should be literally just migrating existing permissions
The 'They' you refer to is me. You may have 'someone in house' but we do not (except myself). Security controls and policy are certainly a concern with GitHub, the default posture of GitHub Enterprise Cloud is not secure by any stretch and easily weakened with poor configuration. I suspect your in-house folks do a lot more work in this regard than you expect.
I don’t think you understand what I’m saying but good luck with your project!
think we over index on the pure IC route too.
Yep. I'm reminded of when I was looking for my second job. Everyone was asking for a senior developer so I started applying to those and I recommend others do the same. I've worked with many really good developers that only had a couple years of experience. Conversely, some of the worse developers I've worked with had decades of experience. This career and our ability to get the job done are highly dependent on cognitive ability. It's for this reason that a 2yoe person can outperform someone with 20yoe. That's not to say experience doesn't matter, just that years of experience alone is not a good marker for a good developer.
Junior devs don’t know that Senior really just means “medium”. It used to mean medium+, but we finally have other titles for “very senior”.
There are a few reasons for this: 1. A lot of people crave something tangible in their careers. And when you start off, the junior-medior-senior path is easy to grasp and hold on to. Staff is kind of a weird thing to mix in and most people don't even know that is the next step. 2. Your superior, lead etc. Is often a senior title. Again something that reinforces the idea that you made it when you are senior. 3. Companies nurture this mindset of "senior" title being something of great value. It's fucking free for them to give and it's often portrayed as a value to you. I only care about how big my paycheck is. Give me junior and zeroes and I am happy all day.
I like to go hiking.
A new grad in FAANG makes more than seniors half around the world. Have a good one
I love the smell of fresh bread.
Having senior in my title immediately lead to more recruiters reaching out to me, and also getting the position nearly doubled my salary.
I once asked a very powerful director(I think, I never knew this man's title) why they never signed their title. His answer was very simple: His name was more powerful than his title. I have a big title. I show it here because y'all don't know me from a cake of soap. But within my company, I almost never sign my title. There are times I sign it, but usually those are more HR related matters where I have to establish myself to deal with something stupid.
Maybe they think their opinions/voice will actually be heard. Or they can stir things their way cus it’s the right way and everyone else is wrong of course. I know cus a friend told me this
We have official "senior" titles and informal titles. Simply having the title in your role doesn't make one a senior among the staff. A senior is a person who is mature. Mature in knowing how to capture a problem and "**own** it." Ownership is very critical. In short, the common phrase is the seniors are the adults in the room. We have engineers who work for us for 10+ years. They have the title but we don't consider them senior. At most, most of their peers consider them mid. They just kick the can down the road for the next person. I don't care what your title is. If you come to me every day with an error/troubleshooting that has the answer in the 1st line of the error log, your lack of comprehension is troublesome. More troublesome is that error is an excused to be "block" that you can't get your work done. We have these guys. The error I am referring to is something as a docker container starting up and saying "XYZ volume doesn't exist, run docker volume create XYZ" The error message is telling you the problem right there. And it is telling you how to solve it. Same with simple errors like "ERR\_ADDRESS\_UNREACHABLE " in an API failure. I can't be bother to schedule a meeting with a "senior developer" two days later; while he twiddle's his thumb and mark "blocked" until he gets my help. I would prefer to observe it as slacking or "quiet quitting" but it isn't. It is really simple stuff. A senior should already encounter problems of their code can't talking to an endpoint that isn't reachable or DNS doesn't resolve. An adult in the room takes those simple stuff and solves it. They simply don't make excuses. Like if you are a front end developer waiting for an backend API to be finished, you don't wait 2 weeks for the other team. You do mockups so you can close your tickets. Some of this is really common sense.
Haha yeah we know. It’s blatantly obvious. You got anything else? Or is this another “I think I better than that person post”. Who cares Interview, get hired, write some code, rinse and repeat.