Entry Level ought to be 'willing to train', Junior, some experience, Senior, 8+ years of experience.
Sadly title inflation is also a thing.
Sadly title inflation is also a thing.
"Senior" implies "Highly Experienced" meaning "lots of years of experience".
Whereas it's completely possible for a person with 3-4 years of experience to be a "Very Good Engineer" within their specific domain and be as valuable, respected, listened-to, etc. as a "Senior Engineer". It doesn't happen often, but it happens.
If we had titles more like "Apprentice", "Journeyman", and "Master" Software Engineer, then we wouldn't have this issue. Someone could be a Journeyman after 2 years or 4 depending on how rapidly they progressed through their "apprenticeship" phase, and to "Master" as soon as they had completed sufficiently complex work to have completed a "masterpiece" equivalent.
Lots of years of experience translate to having a proven track record of delivered value, along with management skills and experience of failure, things that can't be substituted by talent or knowledge acquired from reading about the works of others.
> a person with 3-4 years of experience to be a "Very Good Engineer"
Not the same thing — this is actually the same problem as with hiring practices that people love to hate. Good college degrees, open source contributions, algorithmic exercises during the interview, etc... are all designed to prove your worth. People don't like you for what you are, because you have to show them what you're capable of first. And with 3-4 years of experience, you can slap that "Master" label on your job title, but without being able to show something for it, people will just laugh at you.
Also this trend of disrespecting the elderly is nothing new. Ageism is a thing and your opinion is actually in line with what the entire world is already thinking. Younger means cheaper, more prone to abuse, to working long hours and for many tasks just as capable as a more expensive senior.
Of course, this is beneficial to young people, but the tragedy is that it doesn't last. You'll be playing a whole different tune in 5 years max, either because you'll end up competing with people that are 5 to 10 years younger and cheaper, or because the bubble will finally burst due to automation, leaving this sea of STEM graduates out of a job, just like steel workers in the nineties. We are automating ourselves as part of our job description, so it should be no surprise when it happens.
3 years is minimum for getting close to being competent. I would argue that before that you will deliver very little.
These levels are not exactly transferable necessarily.
You should be able to trust that an experienced developer like this would be able to adapt to newer methods and API.
If you take language out of it, the experience is easily transferable.
The problem is everyone thinks their project/product is special and they're inventing something completely new. You're not. Sorry. This is software where everything old is new again.
One should not expect that people use every skill they have at every job they do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnons_du_Tour_de_France if you don't know what it is.
Slightly weird mapping of the traditional Establishment to our industry. Their home page includes items such as "Capercaillie Shoot" (not clear if this involves real grouse as it's in Essex), and "Report on the Funeral of Brigadier Tim Hackworth OBE PhD"
I'm pretty sure the shooting is just clays, and not live birds.
Not necessarily. Medicine has "Senior Resident" or similar in some countries as the last step before becoming an independent physician. Law and finance have senior associate before junior partner.
61% of "Entry-Level" Jobs require 3+ years of Experience
In the Bay Area culture, 3 years is enough time to jump jobs once:
year 1 = figure out how to navigate tech corp
year 2 = figure out that it's a sh!t show.
year 3 = jump and find greener pastures. repeat year 1.And my lifelong experience is that such pepole have pretty good careers, better then humble more self aware people.
I am confident in claiming that title was dependent more on confidence then skills. You got it basically for never admitting you don't know something.
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor....
As an aside, a friend got listed with the title cosmocrator (ruler of the universe, when translated directly from greek) in the phonebook. All it took was for him to request it when they asked for a title, and, when asked what it was, reply that it was a form of kinesiology.
All in all, you probably should not but to much stock into titles. Even less so, if they are not protected.
LinkedIn is full of people who have mysteriously sprouted a Senior prefix that they definitely didn’t have when I was at the same company at the same time. So it probably is self-granted in most cases.