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Comment by DaiPlusPlus | Hacker News Reader

I find that any company that actually gives its college-hires the formal job-title "Junior Developer" is not a good place to work: I interpret it as saying they don't respect their own employees. YMMV.

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How would you name them then? In my experience many companies tend to give all the developers senior statuses even though they are actually still quite juniorish. What’s wrong to be a Junior Developer?

I'd trim-off the "Junior" and leave it at that. For a formal job-title (as HR would demand) it's common to have Roman numerals appended, e.g. "SWE I" and "SWE II" before you get "Senior". The semantics is the same: "SWE I" == "Junior SWE" but without the unpleasant connotations that the term "Junior" specifically has, especially when you have older folks coming in at an entry-level (e.g. from coding-camps or a midlife career change) where referring to a 40something as "Junior" just feels weird.

That's how it's done at all the US software companies I've worked at, including Microsoft and some startups.

My current company does has done away with job-titles entirely and we make up whatever we want on our business-cards (within reason).

Ok, seems like a good alternative. I didn’t know about it, in Germany it’s simply „Junior“ and „Senior“. If you are like a year or two in a company you usually are simply upgraded to „Senior“ no matter what. Even though I wouldn’t consider Junior offensive I like the system you describe much more.

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