I have been interviewing lately and am wondering what being a senior usually means from your perspective.
Since i have been working consulting and architecture gigs lately i feel a bit rusty coding wise and am wondering what the expectations regarding ramp-up and onboarding are in your organizations, without all the interviewing BS.
The first thing I want to get out of the way is that I think someone can have 20 years of 'experience' at his job and still be junior.
I think Senior to me has two sides.
One is being experienced in the particular stack your new company uses. The more experience you have with this and the more in depth knowledge the more senior it makes you. As per the first point though it's possible to have 10 years of experience as say an Oracle DBA but you are really still junior and can only work on menial tasks someone assigns you.
The other part I'd say is the ability to figure stuff out. You can be senior with 2 years of experience. You have a drive to figure stuff out. You catch on quickly. You notice things. You follow up. You communicate the unsaid and remove assumptions. You dig into things but know when to seek help. You don't need to know the stack your company uses but because of the aforementioned attributes you figure it out quickly and can soon navigate the new job/codebase with ease. Doesn't mean you know everything by heart but you know how to find things. Even in an unknown codebase.
HR probably doesn't care and just goes by years coz that's all they understand how to filter by.