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Comment by angarg12 | Hacker News Reader

Senior Engineer is one of the most abused terms in the industry. Depending on the company it can mean anything from "literally not a novice" to "leads the delivery of complex systems involving several teams". Without context the term has become almost useless.

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This. I hate hearing people whine about "still a junior engineer at 25" or boasting that they "reached senior engineer at 24 after 3 years" or whatever nonsense. It's apples and oranges between companies.

To take it a step further, I’ve been in the industry for closer to 15 years than 10, and while I am considered “senior” I don’t consider myself as such. 15 should be the minimum cutoff. Spending 3 years doing __literally anything__ doesn’t make someone an expert. You could argue 10 years but I’d argue back.

I would argue time is a poor metric.

It's about the value you are able to bring, not howmany days you worked.

It's not direct time, but experience, which is incredibly hard to measure. I've met several engineers that have been working for years and years … and yet seem to have little to no experience. Things like, "why are you writing a parser, in a language you claim to be an expert in, for a language for which the language you're writing in has a parser in its standard library?" And then of course, the people who, if they have the need to use something, will have the docs open next to it as they work with it, diligently Google for answers, seek out tutorials or reference materials … and 3 months later are basically experts in that topic. Age is irrelevant, time is only tangentially related; it's that they put the effort into learning something.

I'm less clear on if it's value. There's "direct value", like, I literally helped make $X, or so. And then there's "what my employer wants done", which might very well be worthless. For the latter, I could argue that I am valuable to them, from their perspective, as I am doing what they desire … even if ultimately it is not worth something.

That is, I've plugged away at many valueless projects, things that the company wanted done, but ultimately won't bring value. Nonetheless, I can bring my experience to bear on the problem and move a mountain or two.

The times I have brought value have usually been quick and unexpectedly. Like, just by being aware of what's running & catching a $20k/month mistake. Or understanding how something is done, to unstick / enable someone else. But it is often not part of my goals, what I am doing day-to-day, or something I get to claim/matters in performance reviews.

And sometimes, you don't get to know what your value is. I remember at one company we had this really onerous customer: completely custom thing was built for them, it was always lots of back and forth, weird corner cases, just lots and lots of custom stuff. We thought we were mostly bending over backwards for someone for little gain. Turned out they paid quite well, but for the longest time, we had no idea: finance didn't share that information with us. And this is true of most companies I've worked for: the financial details are completely opaque, unshared, and I couldn't tell you if I'm bringing value or not, ultimately.

Absolutely!

There's a lot of people with the same 1 year of experience repeated several times, who then call themselves 'Senior' based only on number of years.

It’s also dumb since I’ve had that title for almost 10 years now but I’m easily 3-5x better at my job than when I initially got it. I do get paid more which is nice and work at a better company. I still mainly like to code and system design so I’m not planning on becoming a professional meeting-goer.

I think the title has seen some inflation in the past years.

When talking with my oldest collogues, those that started out in the 70s, "Senior Engineer" was apparently reserved for, well, very senior engineers. People could have worked 10-15 years, before getting promoted to that.

These days, it's almost something which happens automatically after 5 years. I've even seen people get angry and frustrated if they haven't gotten that promotion after as little as 2 or 3 years.

But to their defense, A LOT of companies just use the various titles to place them in the correct salary bracket. I've seen examples of hiring more junior people than the title would indicate, simply because they were good candidates / seemed to have potential. And then they were stuck without salary promotions for 2-3 years, as their work output didn't necessarily warrant any higher salary.

Lots of weirdness in this industry, compared to the others I've worked in.

I don’t see why there is so much emphasis on years. I have 15 years experience myself but I’ve met people with 5 years that were clearly superior to me at leading large scale engineering efforts.

Skills and experience aren't the same thing. The second amplifies the first. If you aren't good at/don't like leadership then finding less senior people who are better at it is not going to be hard. Fortunately leadership is only one skill among many that are valuable in engineering.

It's because companies got liberal with titles. Probably in part due to how fast pay has increased. It's seen as commonplace now, so people expect this fast progression.

To be fair, in the 70s it was much harder to be productive as an engineer. You weren't writing javascript, you were writing fotran, or cobol, or assembly code, or C. Everything was much less "standard" than it was today, from processor instruction sets to compilers to system calls to source control, etc. It took A LOT of work to understand all the arcane knowledge and become productive. Nowadays, you can read some books, deploy your code to AWS where it runs with 99.99999999% x-platform consistency. The benchmark of being a senior engineer is not "p85 engineer" its "has demonstrated ability to deliver value at specified scope" and its just takes less time to learn everything you need to do that now. Can a person with 3 years XP be a senior? No, they can be a sophomore (think they know it all but mess everything up), but do you need 15 years experience to be a true senior, no you do not.

reading around the internet, people put way to much emphasis on titles like senior. people also seem to act like there is a standard for senior across companies. even in a company i've seen senior titled people doing work with the same scope or have the same responsibility as junior people.

ime the only thing you can count on the term senior meaning is that you're in a different pay band then other levels. other then that the term is meaningless.

At my employer it extends to staff/principal engineers.

They do the same low-level code work, but I'll hand it to them that they are some of the best engineers at the company.

The difference is that principals left the company for a couple years to come back for the higher pay. Staffs were promoted while staying at the company.

A "senior" title often equates to a pay range in companies. This can lead to employees that want/need to get paid more (and leadership wanting to retain/hire them) getting a senior title without the expected experience.

I've heard it said that comparing levels across companies is like comparing salaries across countries.

My title was recently changed to Sr Software Engineer. I only have about 3 years of experience (though I would say they are some good quality years spanning a ton of different properties and projects).

I just happen to be at the top of our small (less than 10) team of in house developers, so tricky things are escalated to me and I do my best on them.

No kidding. I think part of the reason is also the huge amount of people flooding into dev roles, so having 2-4 years of experience puts you ahead of 70% (random number) of the other applicants, who all have 1-2 years, and you're relatively 'senior' (compared to other industries, where it would require several times longer, at least). That plus the depressingly reductionist Medium-article-writing culture with people elaborating on how to become ~Senior~ in three simple steps. Context is everything here.

Hell yeah, what I've seen in the past year of job hunting what they asked from a senior devs, are either or in combination of (ordered by number of occurrence):

- expert at programming

- dev ops

- business / system analyst

- team lead or project / people manager

- automated test engineer

- product owner

It's almost feels like they're searching for a unicorn

I will add my contextual industry experience. When I started out roughly 20yrs ago a "Senior" engineer started at 10yrs experience. Junior was < 5yrs. Intermediate between.

One of the first steps to title inflation was people started to include internships and their time in college as "years of experience" . So this meant new grads could have 5 years experience in their minds. Part of this is fair because if the industry is going to start a 12 week boot camp person at 0, there should be _something_ for the 4 year bachelor.

"Senior" the title is different from "senior" the role. The former is close to irrelevant; the latter is what's interesting.

One of the few companies that I have seen to have constantly kept the bar is Amazon. I have seen many other who have just inflated the titles to keep folks happy.

The bar is per-team at Amazon, which is one of the bug hiring problems.

Worse, your title - and your quality of life at Amazon - is entirely dependent upon what your manager thinks of you.

It matters way more than at other companies.

Or even worse: an indicator of time spent in the industry

So does any corporate and non-corporate title since 3 decades.

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