The very concept of this is so absurd as to be entirely ridiculous. Title inflation at it's finest.
To think a person can have enough real-world experience to become "senior" in any field within 3-4 years is absolute insanity.
I do suspect if I ran into a 24 year old that called themself a "senior engineer" with a straight face, I'd likely burst out laughing...
Laughing is not taking out one's displeasure on someone.
You have made this statement before, but not taken the time to explain why you believe that. Perhaps if you explain your position others will be more sympathetic to it.
You can start hacking on things as a kid with little more than a computer and an internet connection. You can literally have junior engineer knowledge when graduating high school. Add in a bit of formal education and a few years of experience, you can be a legitimate senior engineer at 24.
In fact, one of the best engineers I ever worked with was 21 and working at staff level. Things just clicked with him, so it didn't take long in the professional world for him to round out his knowledge.
By contrast, most other fields require expensive equipment or advanced techniques to gain actual, real experience. A high schooler might be able to weld a track car together, but it's a lot harder for them to do FEA (finite element analysis) or load testing without serious equipment.
L3 is a new graduate
L4 is mid level (an engineer who you can generally trust to complete the tasks they're assigned)
L5 is Senior (who owns/shapes the direction of the team)
L6 is Staff (who has to see upcoming problems and shape efforts across the organization)
L7 shapes a product
L8 shapes a division
L9 shapes an industry
It's very possible that a 24 year old could become an L5 with a typical path: college 18-21, straight to Google for 3 years on the same team and becoming one of the main contributors on the team.
Considering that Google grew its headcount by over 50% between 2020 and 2022, there could be plenty of mid level engineers joining the 24 year old's team who they are able to lead now since they have an extra 3 years worth of experience + context in the specific area.
Someone has to have actual experience to be considered senior. Being a couple years out of college is not experienced.
> All it means is the individual has any amount of experience.
By this logic - what would we call someone with 15 years of experience? What about 25 years? Super Supreme Senior Engineer, Level 9000?
The field needs to stop inflating titles. It's bad enough having people willy-nilly call themselves "engineers", let alone tack-on qualifiers like "senior".
If your company wants to grossly inflate titles, fair enough - but your next job will then look like a demotion.
Counting someone as senior purely by a clock is also absurd. It's about knowledge, depth and breadth. A person with 3ish years of experience does not have either... we used to just call that "engineer".
But... go ahead, keep assigning recent graduates absurd titles. Inflating people's egos helps keep salaries low.
Apparently you need one more counterexample? I certainly do not think one can be considered senior after 3-4 years as well.
But I would also be curious, how you would then call someone with 15 years, or oh my, 25 years of experience?
> Being a couple years out of college is not experienced.
Life doesn't start at age 21.
You can't have a "makes decent estimations engineer", or "wasn't quit by the team lead engineer", or "gets paid twice as much data scientist". Some company go with "ninja" or "rockstar", or stick level numbers straight in the title but meh...so we settle for "senior" for most of these demarcations.