On Being a Senior Engineer

Part of the problem is the interview process.

So so so many "senior engineers" get hired because they can traverse trees with their eyes closed but when it comes to writing solid designs and the desire to dig deep, they fall short.

There was a time when senior engineers could wrench open a compiler to figure things out. Now, these guys are useless without some rockstars maintaining the underlying infra.

To me, senior engineer is that point when you have hit your stride, you are very good at what you do, and the next level is where you start to mentor younger engineers and let them take credit for your ideas/insight.

That's what Steve Kleiman (Sun/Sparc/vnodes/threads) did for me and he was definitely well past what we called senior staff engineers.

If you are the captain of the boat or even one of the officers that comes with risks and rewards. My perspective is that there is increased exposure to potentially career ending outages as you move to the top technical positions and that should be recognized.

> Generation X (and even more so generation Y) are cultures of immediate gratification

uh huh. thanks for that.

Does this guy even remember his 20s anymore?

> I’ve worked with a staggering number of engineers that expect the “career path” to take them to the highest ranks of the engineering group inside 5 years just because they are smart. This is simply impossible in the staggering numbers I’ve witnessed

Pretty common at the big companies. 5 years is quick, but it's the start of when people start to hit senior in larger numbers.

If you won't give them something, someone else will. Remember that, and maybe reconsider your biases.

> What then? “Super engineer”? Five more years? “Super-duper engineer

Depending on where you are, staff/principal/distinguished/fellow/partner/etc...

If your engineering ladder ends at Senior that's a failure on your part honestly.

When is it appropriate to call someone a senior engineer? When they hit 65? When they are the most experienced engineer left? When they come in and announce that they are no longer going to attempt to expand their skills in any way?

If you want to stick in SE 1-6 before senior then go ahead. It seems like what the complain is really against the the typical bands we see at a lot of companies nowadays.

Well, there is a lot here that I think is good. A lot of this is about what a good developer should and shouldn't do, so I think some attention to what their employer should and shouldn't do is in order.

A good developer should be okay with making estimates in order to be relied upon to build important things- so far so good. But if you're the only person left, who handles a workload that should be enough for three, and random shit pops up all the time where someone is yelling at you that this must be dealt with, and nobody actually knows what they want so the idea of what is being estimated upon will change 4 times before it's done, and oh yeah our dev infrastructure is broken in various ways........ you see what I mean. There is a point at which committing to ship something in a given amount of time, even when all that other shit happens, is really just a brick in the wall of burnout.

Point made. But more generally there is little thought paid to what employers should be doing to hold up their end of the bargain, and ever more paid to what employees should be doing better.