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Comment by jspash | Hacker News Reader

I’ve never worked with someone who had less than 10 years of experience that I would call a senior engineer. However the number of people who claim to be with less than 5 is astounding!

Maybe the talent pool in the UK has a serious case of Dunning-Krueger?

Whatever the case may be. I find hiring extremely time consuming because I need to wade through so many candidates to find a true senior.

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I have met people with 5 years experience who are significantly more capable than others with 15 so I don't think time is a good metric. A lot of it is about attitude, some of which comes with age, but some is more intrinsic to the person.

I guess it really comes down to why you want a 'senior' and what you want them to be capable of. Are just looking for someone who is really good a coding or do you want someone with lots of experience leading teams and delivering projects from beginning to end. If you primarily want a good programmer then there are lots of people with less than 5 years of experience that are great. If you want someone who has lead teams and shipped products and can help you and your existing team reach new levels and get your next major product out the door, you'll be hard pressed to find that in people with less than 5 years of experience.

Just because you know exceptions, it doesn't mean that it's a bad metric.

Take one of these "people with 5 years of experience" that are great and wait until they have 10 or 15 years of experience. Would you expect them to be a better or a worse engineer then? You need to compare apples to apples, i.e., talented engineers to talented engineers - and in this case, experience often makes a big difference.

I understand that, in our field, there is the impression that older engineers don't "keep up with progress", but this stereotype is just a form of ageism. That might be the case of bad engineers, those who were never great to begin with, but a talented engineer with a lot of experience is really hard to beat. These people can make design and architectural decision for million/billion dollar projects that an engineer with 5 years of experience would never be able to make confidently.

In a nutshell, you can't take experience alone as a predictor of performance, but there is a strong correlation between experience and proficiency.

I generally agree and I think 10 years should be the standard with some exceptions made. Do you mean 10 years of full time experience? What about someone with three years of internship experience in college and 7 years of full time experience after school, who also majored in a relevant subject? That is closer to my career progression and could justify a senior title at around the 6 year mark after college. However it should not be the norm to get senior at 6 years and I think there should be additional guardrails like a universal exam needed to get certified at that level like the Bar exam.

> However the number of people who claim to be with less than 5 is astounding!

Senior engineer since when I had less than 5 YOE - I'm not claiming anything, I'm just using the title used by my employer. Nothing good will happen if I remove the "senior" from my title - in some cases it won't make any difference, in others it will actively harm me and make it more difficult to get the attention of certain recruiters and hiring managers. I'm not sure what you expect someone in my situation to do.

> I find hiring extremely time consuming because I need to wade through so many candidates to find a true senior.

Filter on years of experience - if you're right that 10 YOE is a useful threshold, it will make your candidate search much easier. I think it would be a really bad approach to hiring though because there are many incompetent people with 10 YOE and many great people with less experience. At the end of the day what you want is a good candidate, not a "true senior".

10 is IMHO too much because seniority most of the times stems from soft skills which can develop or be offset in the first place even independent from coding. Also, growth is happening non linearly.

But to be clear: I also think that roles like senior engineer are handed out far too easy.

Very much agree and I also use 10 years as my rough criteria (for PMs though as I am in product)

Haha, wait untill you hear about those seniors or actually señors with 3 yoe

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