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Comment by steverb | Hacker News Reader

I find it kind of amusing that someone with 5-7 years is generally considered a senior software engineer in SV.

Maybe we need a different designation for engineers with 10-20 years of experience? Something other than "the old man/lady".

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I know, I'm 37 and I'm off the scale, apparently. And here in Florida I'm making about the median for a Junior dev in Silicon Valley. For sake of comparison, my first programming job (in Colorado) paid $55k, back in the mid 2000s.

I'd jump at a remote gig in a heartbeat. Right now I'm stuck in an 80s vintage cubicle in a windowless office in an old, dust/mold/despair smelling office building while the beautiful Florida winter passes by outside.

Is it so hard to get SV/Seattle remote jobs even for someone like you (national living in the US)?

I know a bunch of people from eg. Eastern Europe who work for SV startups remotely. I'm European and planning on looking for remote US jobs within the next 2-3 years, hopefully the market is not that bad?

Yes, competition for dev jobs at actual software/tech companies is pretty fierce. I spent years trying to get hired by SV/SF/NYC tech companies (well-known, not so-well known, small startups, etc.), both onsite (when I was younger and more mobile), and remote (more recently).

Never could get to an offer :/ so I work in govt contracting, where the only requirements are having a clearance (which requires being a US citizen) and a butt capable of occupying a seat (actually having a pulse is a plus, but not necessarily required).

My employer uses Principal Software Engineer/Developer.

The full series is Associate x, x, Senior x, Principal x, Senior Principal x.

We also have roughly parallel titles for QA/Test Engineers and Software Architects.

Same, but here they throw in an extra step after Associate, i.e., Senior Associate.

For what it's worth, for a lot of the types of software roles out there, many of them only have existed in their current forms for <10 years. A person whose been working on mobile for >10 years is incredibly rare, so to even find someone who has been doing mobile programming for 5 years should be enough to call them senior given they have been working in the field for half of the time the modern concepts have been around.

There are still many concepts that transcend the specific language / platform. As I've become more attuned to this I'm sometimes horrified by code that supposedly senior engineers write that egregiously violate separation of concerns, for example. An experienced developer who knows how to properly design and architect software should be able to jump ahead of a less experienced developer who has more years experience developing for a specific platform in my opinion but recruiters don't seem to see it this way

I agree, so maybe mobile is a bad example, but look at how different the field of data infrastructure is today than it was ten years ago. While yes, many of the old concepts still exist. A person who worked with big data for 5 years with modern distributed systems is likely more skilled in this space than someone who spent the last 10 years doing ETL jobs linking standard sql databases to columnar stores.

> Maybe we need a different designation for engineers with 10-20 years of experience?

Isn't that what a Principal Engineer is for?

I mean an attending physician is someone with 4+ years of work experience and they get paid bank at that point, but they're salaries tend not to grow a ton after that fact.

Kind of seems about right to me.

Most of the technology these companies are working with are less than a decade old. So, anything beyond that is mostly legacy knowledge.

Let alone someone with 40-50 years programming?

> Maybe we need a different designation for engineers with 10-20 years of experience? Something other than "the old man/lady".

Unemployable?

I kid, but there's just so much doom and gloom sometimes with the ageism posts on HN.

Stop being that doom and gloom then.

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