Riley Sennott, 26, is listed as a "senior advisor"
Senior? At 26?!
Senior? At 26?!
I'd argue without compromise someone with less than 5 years of experience cannot possibly be Senior-anything. Probably should be closer to the 10 year mark... but many will disagree and cite ridiculous company title-scales, including "Level" this and that.
There's tremendous pressure to inflate people's titles to make them feel important - which realistically means people's titles are useless. Hence, "Senior" Engineers complaining about being asked to do L33T code assignments in interviews...
If you're going to spend a 30-40 year career doing something, it should take a long while before you can be considered "Senior". At 5 years, you're probably still making rookie mistakes and having actually experienced engineers clean up after and/or guide you.
e.g. Linus Torvalds was 21 when the first version of Linux was released. I couldn't come close to that now with 10 YOE.
That's not "Senior". That's someone getting their feet wet in an ever-changing industry that requires a certain level of thirst for knowledge and continued learning.
There's always exceptions - and some people are stellar in every way. But on average, 5 years of experience is still training wheels for a great deal of people.
> Linus Torvalds was 21 when the first version of Linux was released.
This is like pointing to Bill Gates or Michael Jordan and saying everyone can do that... Linus is the fabled 10X Rockstar of programming.
> I'd argue without compromise someone with less than 5 years of experience cannot possibly be Senior-anything
To:
> There's always exceptions - and some people are stellar in every way. But on average, 5 years of experience is still training wheels for a great deal of people
So we are in agreement.
Surely that assumes that you can only learn from seeing your actions play out over time. Within the first 3 years of my career, I saw good business decisions, bad business decisions, the fallout of bad business decisions that predated my involvement, good tech stacks, bad tech stacks, and tech stacks that had survived 99% staffing cuts. Now, I still wouldn't have called myself senior at that point, but I absolutely had the experience of seeing what the long-term impact of certain choices was, even if they weren't my decisions or even if I hadn't been there and had to work from second-hand accounts (and sometimes, code/docs).
My point is, there's no way (with a few exceptions of course) someone with 5 years of observational experience has enough real experience to make good decisions that impact the organization over the long term.
The ones who can do/learn this within 5 years are exceptional, and tend to be the ones deeply motivated by technology, ie. it's not just a job to them. They go home and work on tech for funsies... staying up late and getting up early to build, read, learn. That's not your average engineer.
Amended: The tech company I'm in now doesn't really hire any engineering position at less than Senior with 5~10 YOE except interns and in departments that they are desperate to fill seats. (Now is a GREAT time to be an AI engineer, you can pretty much name your price.)