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Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

In all the companies I work for in the last 20 years "senior engineer" effectively meant someone with about 5 years of experience.

In general the bar is low, indeed, and the title tends to be quite aggrandizing.

The title that shows seniority ("been there, done that"), again in my experience, is the next one, which usually is "principal engineer".

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But now you’re just moving the goalposts and inevitably someone else will make the same declaration about principal engineers and will instead insist that only Chief Architects (or whatever next step up the corporate ladder of madness is) are the really truly experienced class of engineers.

It’s a pointless challenge to try and bucket engineers by skill levels like that. Titles are for compensation and rank, and nothing more. A senior at my company would’ve been more like a staff engineer at my last spot. Every company is different and thats okay.

When I worked on a project that had a dedicated architect, they really seemed like they were the only one doing engineering work (design). The rest of us were assembling their design, like technicians do.

If drawing over-simplified block diagrams of software components is "engineering", we'd be better off just letting the technicians follow their intution. My experience with principals engaging in this sort of naval gazing is they just fuck everything up. The project was in much better shape before they came along with their fancy engineering ideas.

IDK, I’m a grad student, so most of my programming does not really need engineering, in the same way that carpenters and machinists don’t generally need mechanical engineers to go over their side projects, sheds, and home-made shop tools.

The architect seemed to have a pretty good path mapped out, but it was early on in the project, and I was just an intern so I wasn’t there long enough to see the mess of reality asserting itself.

It’s a bit of a shame that senior titles are being tossed out like candy now, while I had to work my ass off to get there. It took me 16 years, which feels about right to me. I switched my career from systems engineering to network engineering in 2010 so I might have gotten there sooner. (IT jobs for college grads in 2004 were few and far in between in my area and I had to take what I could get.)

I had the same title for 20 year Technical Consultant 3 and then I made the massive jump to TC4, every idiot that can log into Azure is now a Senior Sysadmin and if they can fumble their way through a Linux install they are the IT director (with 2 years of experience total). Titles in our industry aren't worth anything, I equate it to the startup with three employees and their titles are CEO, COO and COT....

How does that square with the junior job postings that want at least ten years of experience with some technology?

From what I’ve seen a senior is just an junior who landed a job

It compares very well: They're both nonsense.

people aren't going to be happy if they don't get a promotion or continuous raises though after 5 years though. what else are you going to call them? have 4 different types of mid level because they can't be 'senior' until they reached 15 yoe? Really after 5 years in the same company, more so in software, you probably are actually one of the more experienced people in the company. idk what you are doing if you dont have senior level domain expertise.

Director? Architect?

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