Software Engineer Titles Have Almost Lost All Their Meaning

This was true 25 years ago when I was in the software industry in SF (I'm retired now), and has probably always been true in the corporate world.

I worked for an old cell phone company called Air Touch, and my job mostly consisted of writing and maintaining some scripts and solving the occasional data cleanup or import/export problem. My training and experience were minimal, although I did a good job even if I do say so myself. My title? Software engineer.

Thirty-plus years into my career, I do not remember this fabled past age of the author's idealistic description, when "senior software engineer" was a badge of some achievement greater than no longer being a junior; I myself gained that august title when I was all of 23 years old, having begun full-time work a couple of years earlier than most. I hardly think anyone would have described me at that time in the superlative terms the author uses for his preferred "senior"; indeed, I've met few people at any level of experience worthy of such fulsome praise.

Instead of getting into the weeds about what titles ought to mean, or embarking on this quixotic effort toward persuading people to harmonize them, I have found it much easier to just ignore them altogether.

Other engineering disciplines require certification/licenses/exams, for software lots of people refuse to even do simple coding tests during interviews. I'm doubtful that software engineer titles have ever had any meaning.

The problem the article doesn't address is that the original system of just having 'Software Engineer' and 'Senior Software Engineer' failed to capture the experience of someone with 5 years of experience moving company.

Either you introduce titles below or above.

In practice the industry did both - Graduate, Associate, SE, SSE, Staff SSE, Principal SSE.

I think part of the problem is how companies shove everything and anything into the engineering role. They have long lists of all your 'core priorities', many of which have nothing to do with engineering. They confuse engineering with "being a good employee of XYZ company".

Before we had software engineers, we had sanitation engineers. At that time, it highlighted the absurdity of 1) title inflation and 2) assigning a tightly qualified moniker to jobs that require far less prequalification and oversight.

I guess it was one of those memorized-but-not-learned lessons.

I don't think that dev titles have ever had much meaning. I started in this career long enough ago that I don't actually remember the last time I paid any attention to them.

A 'VP' in a brokerage firm became 'any new hire' or nearly, quite a long time ago. Now it's reached software? OK.

I don't understand all the hand-wringing here. This always happens eventually in every industry under the sun and is going to keep happening.

Why? Because if you as an employer or manager don't inflate titles, you're eventually going to lose people. Sure, maybe the "right thing to do" is to resist title inflation, but when your good engineers with 5 or 10 years experience see people at other companies getting a Senior title with half the experience, they're going to want a similar title. Are you as an individual manager or company really going to die on that hill and lose good engineers just because it's "better for the industry", when you can keep them at no additional cost just by changing a few words in the HR system?

This may an annoying problem, but it's a pretty small one as far as problems go.

We now have “senior software engineers” who have written zero lines of production code and are masters of jira and confluence.

:/