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Comment by tommek4077 | Hacker News Reader

9 month into the job. Maybe put a "junior" into the headline.

Gatekeeping like this doesn't do anyone any benefit, aside from trying to inflate your ego at the expense of others. If you feel the need to make snarky comments like this, it may be a good moment to stop and ask yourself why.

This isn't gatekeeping, this is signaling that the lead might lack experience to even live through consequences of his processes and decisions.

If you've never finished a project, lived through political, technological and social consequences of your actions, what use is your experience? You could make any decisions and you wouldn't know if they're worth anything.

Doesn't mean his post is useless or worthless - but it does give important context to his writing.

That's a good comment. A lot of people who give advice have never had to live through the long term consequences of their decisions. I have delivered systems that I thought were really well architected at the time but it turned there were a ton of problems and mistakes that cost us dearly years later.

The whole point of titles is to signal some kind of useful information about competence level, etc.

Titles are the exact time we should do some gatekeeping. Being called a “senior engineer” with only 2-3 years is frankly a joke.

I don't really see where you're coming from. The article doesn't mention the word senior in it anywhere, which makes this argument akin to a straw-man for lack of a better word.

If “tech lead” is not at least equivalent to senior, then we have even a bigger problem.

It does serve to benefit the reader.

Knowing if someone is new to what they are discussing makes the reader less likely to take what they say at face value.

While you should still be critical of people who have experience, it probably will hurt you less or give you different insights if what they are saying comes from experience.

For example, I'm fairly certain the world of web programming would be way better off if lots of those tutorials had some sort of "I didn't know what HTTP or arrays were a couple of weeks ago" disclaimer :|

I have a guy at my job talking about himself as a senior devops engineer when he has like a few months of data engineering experience and comes from an analytics background.

why is this, it feels like every other person is a senior nowadays. does it even have any meaning anymore?

it seems like "staff" or "principal" roles are the real "seniors"

Inflation

Because, as the other poster put it, we're now "gatekeeping" if we don't put a big title badge on anyone with a few months of work behind them and willingness to talk big.

Maybe that comes from job ads? Most companies want people with a few years of experience so that they've been "validated" by someone else, so they use the term "senior" to say "not junior".

The problem is that companies with less-experienced upper management think that they can save money by handing out awesome new titles instead of more money. In the short term, they’re right, it’s an old trick that will always work… on certain people. But the people that works on are the kind of people you probably don’t want to retain. Often this happens at companies that have a small software team, but are not primarily software or even technology companies.

I’ve interviewed “Principal Software Engineers” whose understanding of software engineering and computer science were minimal, and it’s because of this phenomenon. Just last week I talked to one who couldn’t explain what what makes an interface RESTful. They had no idea how Git works beyond commit and push. They wrote a unit test that did the exact same stateless thing twice, and asserted that the results were identical. They wanted $250K/yr.

senior is 4-5 years of XP... staff and principal are real leadership roles. senior is short for more seniority than junior.

If a working career is 35-40 years, and most people will be ICs or low-level management for their entire career (meaning, most people won't ever be a Director or VP of anything), it seems unlikely that you can reasonably be considered "senior" after having completed about 10% of your career unless it's a transient thing.

Maybe the real problems are: the lack of advancement opportunities and lack of a real meaningful and achievable tech ladder at most companies.

You have maybe a 40 year career. If you get the "senior" title 2 years into it, odds are you'll have the same title for the next 38 years. That's kind of demoralizing if you're a "ladder climber" personality.

I remember quite clearly sitting in an office back in 2006 or so as a young punk but with enough years behind me to have already reached the salary plateau. Looked around me and saw a guy in his late 50s doing the exact same thing I was doing, with the exact same title, and probably making pretty close to what I was making. It filled me with existential dread! The realization that this industry hardly has any avenues for growth as an IC once you become "senior" and hit that salary plateau. If you don't want to be a people-manager, you're likely going to wander from company to company as a perpetual "Senior Software Engineer" until you are elderly and retire.

There are a handful of companies that have those "staff engineer" and "principal engineer" and "fellow" titles that come with actual salary growth, but they constrain those roles so severely, that most people won't get into the club. Just like most managers will not get into the Director or VP club. And these titles are not meaningful across the industry: If you do make "principal engineer" at your medium-sized startup, nobody else cares: when you get hired at Google, you'll be back to "Senior Software Engineer" and on the treadmill again.

It's kind of a reality that us worker-drones need to just accept and deal with. Companies don't seem to be motivated to provide actual, achievable growth paths that are transferrable from company to company.

Honestly I think places constrain those upper echelon titles so much because there really isn't that much work to be done at that level, and the vast majority of people just aren't that good at it.

> Companies don't seem to be motivated to provide actual, achievable growth paths that are transferrable from company to company.

The cynic in me says why would they if they're getting what they need without it? But taking a step back, most companies don't have any work worthy of someone who actually deserves a Principal or Fellow title. Even Staff doesn't mean much when you work at a logistics company with 10 developers - you're just a glorified manager at that point.

It's because we started giving people senior titles at 6 months or a year of experience. I'm not saying there's a clock running until you can call yourself senior, but if you're doing it with less than 6-8 years of experience it should absolutely make people's eyebrows go up. How many projects can you really work on ideation, design, development, deployment, short-term maintenance and long-term maintenance in 2 years?

Just because the JS framework you're working with is 3 years old doesn't make you a senior because you have 2.5 years of experience with it. There's a lot more to the job than that.

Seniority shouldn’t be time served. I’d have no problems with someone being a senior whatever if they walk the walk.

I’m in data engineering myself these days but if I jumped into some other area, even one I didn’t know from previously, I’d set out to walk the walk there too. It’s not like “We know you’re staff now, but that is backend, so we’ll make you an associate front end dev” or whatever?

I'm considered a senior engineer by the company I work for and my peers, however it makes me cringe to write or say it. I think it comes across as pretentious.

Sounds like a mix of impostor syndrome and recognizing the absurdity of hierarchical labels and ranks.

Labels are a leaky abstraction, genuinely useful for those who don’t (want to) care and know. But useless, maybe harmful, when it comes to difficult problems, conflict and subtle interactions. In these cases we need to recognize that the map is not the territory.

I love titles. They're made up bullshit but people assign value to them.

If I meet someone with 8 years of experience that is not confident to tell me they're a senior engineer, I won't hire them.

If I meet someone with 2 years that tells me they're senior. I'll listen to what they say carefully and judge if they can do the job.

Titles are useful labels that compress a lot of info. It's not about how accurate they are, is about trying to differentiate quickly.

I’ve been in tech lead roles for many years now and I agree with almost everything in this post. 80% of Insights often come early after transition because you can more clearly see the contrast. The other 20% usually comes much later with deep reflection and when you’ve been distanced from the work.

I think the word "becoming" covers that.

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