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Comment by ironmagma | Hacker News Reader

I think you can be senior without experience. To me, senior means "can handle ambiguous/incorrect/incomplete problem definitions."

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I learned how to program starting on calculators in middle school and eventually moving up to games.

Looking back, I accidentally turned my first full time into a senior position almost immediately

A local company gave this self-taught developer a chance as a glorified intern, but a few weeks in and I reimplemented a project they had given to a contractor in a weekend after overhearing their back and forth.

We ended up shipping my MDM on hardware across the country that Christmas, less than 3 weeks after that weekend project, and I spent the next 2 years extending it as a platform: completely driving the functionality that sales would then go and sell new clients on, designing and implementing an autoscaling analytics backend and frontend, embedded V8 so that client's engineers could script the product without mucking in my codebase about with source access ;)

I remember I got a 25k pay raise at one point by simply saying "I was thinking I'd make more once we got past the evaluation period"

I had actually been trying to ask for us to set up a performance review, but in retrospect they were probably terrified of losing this guy they were paying half a senior dev's salary to do 2x the work, and were ok paying 2 thirds of a senior dev's salary instead...

In some ways I feel like the work I did there was more senior than the work I do now, at least in a technical sense. I think it's the soft skills that come from experience

This skill comes from experience. If you're talking about experience in a particular subdomain, then yes for sure.

The trick is, what people refer to "experience" in the workplace is very strictly defined as workplace experience in your role. But you can get experience from a wide variety of tasks, even ones that don't involve your current career. Working with vendors to organize a convention can prepare you for writing software. Or a volunteer/school software project could prepare you for a paid role, but nevertheless it is not counted.

No, you have you know the traps and specifically you have to know your own biases and this only comes with failure, thus experience.

Show me a mid-level engineer and I will show you someone busy walking straight into a trap.

When commercial hiring managers say "experience" though, they don't count school projects, volunteer (OSS) projects, or career-adjacent projects. That is the source of dissonance. You are right, it's just that you* vs. the managers have different definitions of the word.

* also me sometimes, but that's confusing since I just used the commercial definition of the word a few comments above.

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