13 ms·

There is no standard whatsoever for the adjective "Senior" when applied to engineers: Sometimes it means, "Able to work without someone looking over their shou

by a4isms 5y ago

There is no standard whatsoever for the adjective "Senior" when applied to engineers: Sometimes it means, "Able to work without someone looking over their shoulder at all times." Sometimes it means, "Able to lead and mentor others." And sometimes it means, "Has organizational skills above and beyond engineering skills, able to lead cross-team initiatives and deal with all the human/organization issues around the engineering." The latter definition is the most interesting to me, it describes what "Staff" and "Principal" engineers do in most orgs. But if I had to pick a line to draw, I'd say that while a Staff or Principal spends most or all of their time working on projects that involve the human/organization issues around the engineering, a senior engineer is one who does this at least part of the time. There are other, perfectly valid perspectives on what makes an engineer "senior," but what I like about this one that's relevant to TFA is that this kind of "seniority" is hard to fake.

austincheney 5y ago
Looking at many job posts senior means capable of using React and capable of talking about, but not necessarily using, TypeScript. When senior sounds like faster junior I really have trouble finding what actually differentiates a senior from a junior at these organizations.
- vp8989 5y ago
  It's quite common in larger companies for "senior" to actually mean "mid-level" or "not junior". This title inflation provides some flexibility to create a level below the new grad level, to hire people from non-traditional backgrounds who would otherwise fail a typical entry level screening but are willing to (temporarily) work for low $ to get themselves on the "engineering ladder". It also makes new grad offers cosmetically/psychologically more competitive. All else being equal, if company A offers you "junior software engineer" and company B offers you "software engineer" you might favor the latter.
gjsman-1000 5y ago
If you look around Indeed, Senior Engineer is basically equal to 5 years experience.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- a4isms 5y ago
  Pardon me while I blow the dust off the standard quip about "years of experience:" "Is that one year of experience, repeated five times?"
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    In my job, I was able to get a position just as "Software Developer." I didn't like devaluing "Software Engineer" and I didn't want to be seen as a WordPress guy if I used "Web Developer." (My job is web development with Laravel.) And lastly, I didn't want to be called "Junior" (because I have less than 5 years experience).
  - gmadsen 5y ago
    id rather have someone with one year repeated 5 times than someone with just one year. Those aren't equivalent
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  My very first job even before I graduated was 'Senior' (not a brag, an indication that the title doesn't mean much.) Mid-level individual contributors at Goldman Sachs are 'Vice President'. These titles can't be read literally, can't be quantified, and can't be compared between companies. Any attempt to do so is futile.
- andi999 5y ago
  I think what is important is once to have seen couple of times the happy path (successful project) and at least the unhappy path (unsuccessful project) and see how a senior can mitigate the repercussion of the unsuccessful project. Basically see the stuff which no book tells you.
flatiron 5y ago
Sometimes it means “someone who can bill $300 an hour” with no relation to actual ability. I was a “senior” three years out of college and I had no clue what in the world I was doing. Come to think of it after 20 years I kinda still feel that way.
- a4isms 5y ago
  I have demonstrated my ability to convince clients to pay amounts of money like this for my skills. And yes, the not-so-secret thing about consulting is that if you're able to convince a client that you're worth $500 an hour, it's just easy to convince them to pay $300 an hour for the work of a colleague of yours they've never seen.
  - dkarl 5y ago
    Ugh, I encountered this a few times early in my career (early 2000s.) The worst case was a team from a large, expensive, high-end consulting company. There was one A player who was fast and sharp and absolutely invaluable, two developers who were slow but diligent, one guy who everybody avoided because he was pissed off that he wasn't as smart as the A player, and one engineer who spent all day in front of an IDE but never checked in any code. Once, as a prank, a couple of my coworkers sent me over to "help" this last person (to be clear, the prank was on both me and the person I was sent to help.) They were staring at code that was just syntactically wrong, and not in a subtle way. It was a Java source file, and the line that they were working on, which I think was the only line they had changed, did not look like Java. They couldn't see what was wrong with it, and honestly neither could I, in the sense that I could only see that it didn't look like Java. This person had been "working" on the project for several weeks, and from that point on, I felt intensely sorry them, because they came to work every day for eight hours, and sat in a chair looking at an IDE, going to meetings, staying late if the A player stayed late, etc., nobody ever talking to them, and I can't imagine what kind of bizarre hell that was for them. I didn't feel comfortable talking to them about it because there was an age and culture and language gap, so I'll never know. When the consulting' contract was up, we renewed, but that person was replaced with another slow but diligent worker, and I never saw them again.
alex_anglin 5y ago
In the context of 'IT Consulting Companies,' which the blog post is about, it means that clients are paying a higher billable rate than for more 'junior' staff.
- a4isms 5y ago
  I have worked in consulting, and internally, the above was pretty-much our definition of "senior" that we used to determine who was billed out at "senior rates:" The engineers who also had customer-facing skills and coördination skills and understanding the customer's byzantine constraints skills and so forth. Those who focused on just coding were billed out for less than those who spent time in meetings and writing words.
- pjc50 5y ago
  I was made "senior developer" three months out of university for exactly this reason. It helped that I also knew what I was doing, but the whole 1st dotcom bubble was a crazy time.
robbyking 5y ago
On a related note, I dated a woman who was promoted to vice president of a small start up when she was in her 20's. She had to hide her title on her resume when she left because no established firm wanted to hire someone whom they assumed they'd need to pay a quarter million dollars to be competitive. Sometimes grandiose titles can work against you.
- ska 5y ago
  > Sometimes grandiose titles can work against you. Early stage startups can be especially hilarious that way, especially when young founders/early stage employees mistakenly feel they need a "big" title to be taken seriously...
  - derwiki 5y ago
    Sometimes they do! My last company worked with title companies and it’s a little “insulting” to send less than a director to meet with them.
    - zaphod12 5y ago
      oh yeah, this is super true of sales. everyone in your sales org needs absurd titles or nobody will ever speak to them. Just one of those things apparently.
  - danielvaughn 5y ago
    Yep, indeed. I'm technically the CTO of the startup I'm helping to found. And even though I'm 37, I haven't been in tech long enough to feel like I've earned that title, so my LinkedIn says Chief Software Architect (I made it up).
    - camhart 5y ago
      "It's interesting, these titles," Musk said. "You know that there's actually only three titles that actually mean anything for a corporation? It's president, secretary, and treasurer. And technically they can be the same person. And all these other titles are just basically made up. So CEO is a made-up title, CFO is a made-up title. General counsel, a made-up title. They don't mean anything." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXtjnNWUeAk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXtjnNWUeAk
nimbius 5y ago
id agree with these points, but argue its an everything kind of package that comes within the first year of someone hiring on. whenever I help hire a senior-level engine mechanic or technician for a shop, I need to know they can do the work without a lot of supervision. I also need to know theyll resolve the issues on the shop floor and be able to communicate those issues to a customer as well as a greenhorn tech straight out of a brake shop without chewing them up if its their fault. They need to have the ability to delegate things, get along with people and get the job done. most of all, i dont need the team to see "a new senior mechanic just got hired." I need the team to see a new mechanic and form a consensus that she is senior based on their walk, not my talk. in that first year ill spend more time in the break room sucking down folgers and listening, or just walking the floor stocking ear plugs and soap dispensers and waiting to see what they do.
tom-thistime 5y ago
'Senior Engineer' is just a pay grade. I'm sorry, maybe the world should be a saner place, but that's how it is.
- hhlevnjak3 5y ago
  And it often just means: most senior person working on this project or for this company. Even if that's 1 or 2 years of experience.
  - tom-thistime 5y ago
    It could be that meaningful, but sometimes it's not.
curun1r 5y ago
As someone who has hired a new grad into a “Senior Engineer” role, it meant the title of the salary band that met the candidate’s salary requirements to make our offer competitive with the other offers he received. We wanted to hire a junior role since our team was already relatively senior. But the company’s salary bands were not at all competitive for entry-level developers. So we classed the new hire as senior to make it work. Some companies’ policies are stupid and inflexible and engineers would rather just work around the problem than having to fight against HR.
- heyitsanewacco 5y ago
  Ding ding ding, we have a winner! I'm running a hiring competition right now for a "Senior." The pay band is less than what entry level startups pay. So we rotate through a never ending stream of kids who leave for better salaries because we don't have any higher levels. Sometimes we do get lucky and pick up a mediocre lifer (like me) so HR sees no incentive to change. Never take a job for a company where you are not on the value chain!
  - distrill 5y ago
    > Sometimes we do get lucky and pick up a mediocre lifer (like me) why?
    - trentnix 5y ago
      Maybe he bought a house in the neighborhood. Maybe he really likes writing COBOL. Maybe his spouse works there as well. Maybe he is simply extremely risk averse. There are a number of good reasons somebody might decide to stay put, even if it might be more lucrative or exciting elsewhere.
    - lostlogin 5y ago
      To a lot of people conditions matter more than money.
    - krinchan 5y ago
      Because not everyone feels the need to rate their self-worth by how much wealth they’ve hoarded. I’m already set for retirement and I have my house nearly paid off. I’m comfortable and I don’t make $250,000 a year. I barely work more than 32 hours a week and I just got promoted. Full time work from home with a free working trip back to my old stomping grounds to catch up with friends twice a year. Why would I break my psyche with burnout, stress, and work I despise just to make someone else exponentially more money so I can make marginally more money I don’t need? Miss me with that hustle porn, thanks.
kolla 5y ago
When I read "senior" I often interpret it as "has a lot of experience" which has nothing to do with skill. Speaking for myself who has a shit ton of experience in a lot of tools, techniques, languages and so on but is SHIT in most of them. I'd be hired before a lot of better candidates based on my years of experience in the area but not because of my skill in the area.
zuhayeer 5y ago
We try to map some of these titles across different companies with Levels.fyi We also normalized some of the scope and responsibility definitions for software engineering levels based on what we've seen through company leveling rubrics that we collect: https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html

by a4isms 5y ago

austincheney 5y ago

Looking at many job posts senior means capable of using React and capable of talking about, but not necessarily using, TypeScript. When senior sounds like faster junior I really have trouble finding what actually differentiates a senior from a junior at these organizations.

vp8989 5y ago
It's quite common in larger companies for "senior" to actually mean "mid-level" or "not junior". This title inflation provides some flexibility to create a level below the new grad level, to hire people from non-traditional backgrounds who would otherwise fail a typical entry level screening but are willing to (temporarily) work for low $ to get themselves on the "engineering ladder". It also makes new grad offers cosmetically/psychologically more competitive. All else being equal, if company A offers you "junior software engineer" and company B offers you "software engineer" you might favor the latter.

gjsman-1000 5y ago

If you look around Indeed, Senior Engineer is basically equal to 5 years experience.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
a4isms 5y ago
Pardon me while I blow the dust off the standard quip about "years of experience:" "Is that one year of experience, repeated five times?"
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  In my job, I was able to get a position just as "Software Developer." I didn't like devaluing "Software Engineer" and I didn't want to be seen as a WordPress guy if I used "Web Developer." (My job is web development with Laravel.) And lastly, I didn't want to be called "Junior" (because I have less than 5 years experience).
- gmadsen 5y ago
  id rather have someone with one year repeated 5 times than someone with just one year. Those aren't equivalent
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
chrisseaton 5y ago
My very first job even before I graduated was 'Senior' (not a brag, an indication that the title doesn't mean much.) Mid-level individual contributors at Goldman Sachs are 'Vice President'. These titles can't be read literally, can't be quantified, and can't be compared between companies. Any attempt to do so is futile.
andi999 5y ago
I think what is important is once to have seen couple of times the happy path (successful project) and at least the unhappy path (unsuccessful project) and see how a senior can mitigate the repercussion of the unsuccessful project. Basically see the stuff which no book tells you.

flatiron 5y ago

Sometimes it means “someone who can bill $300 an hour” with no relation to actual ability. I was a “senior” three years out of college and I had no clue what in the world I was doing. Come to think of it after 20 years I kinda still feel that way.

a4isms 5y ago
I have demonstrated my ability to convince clients to pay amounts of money like this for my skills. And yes, the not-so-secret thing about consulting is that if you're able to convince a client that you're worth $500 an hour, it's just easy to convince them to pay $300 an hour for the work of a colleague of yours they've never seen.
- dkarl 5y ago
  Ugh, I encountered this a few times early in my career (early 2000s.) The worst case was a team from a large, expensive, high-end consulting company. There was one A player who was fast and sharp and absolutely invaluable, two developers who were slow but diligent, one guy who everybody avoided because he was pissed off that he wasn't as smart as the A player, and one engineer who spent all day in front of an IDE but never checked in any code. Once, as a prank, a couple of my coworkers sent me over to "help" this last person (to be clear, the prank was on both me and the person I was sent to help.) They were staring at code that was just syntactically wrong, and not in a subtle way. It was a Java source file, and the line that they were working on, which I think was the only line they had changed, did not look like Java. They couldn't see what was wrong with it, and honestly neither could I, in the sense that I could only see that it didn't look like Java. This person had been "working" on the project for several weeks, and from that point on, I felt intensely sorry them, because they came to work every day for eight hours, and sat in a chair looking at an IDE, going to meetings, staying late if the A player stayed late, etc., nobody ever talking to them, and I can't imagine what kind of bizarre hell that was for them. I didn't feel comfortable talking to them about it because there was an age and culture and language gap, so I'll never know. When the consulting' contract was up, we renewed, but that person was replaced with another slow but diligent worker, and I never saw them again.

alex_anglin 5y ago

In the context of 'IT Consulting Companies,' which the blog post is about, it means that clients are paying a higher billable rate than for more 'junior' staff.

a4isms 5y ago
I have worked in consulting, and internally, the above was pretty-much our definition of "senior" that we used to determine who was billed out at "senior rates:" The engineers who also had customer-facing skills and coördination skills and understanding the customer's byzantine constraints skills and so forth. Those who focused on just coding were billed out for less than those who spent time in meetings and writing words.
pjc50 5y ago
I was made "senior developer" three months out of university for exactly this reason. It helped that I also knew what I was doing, but the whole 1st dotcom bubble was a crazy time.

robbyking 5y ago

On a related note, I dated a woman who was promoted to vice president of a small start up when she was in her 20's. She had to hide her title on her resume when she left because no established firm wanted to hire someone whom they assumed they'd need to pay a quarter million dollars to be competitive. Sometimes grandiose titles can work against you.

ska 5y ago
> Sometimes grandiose titles can work against you. Early stage startups can be especially hilarious that way, especially when young founders/early stage employees mistakenly feel they need a "big" title to be taken seriously...
- derwiki 5y ago
  Sometimes they do! My last company worked with title companies and it’s a little “insulting” to send less than a director to meet with them.
  - zaphod12 5y ago
    oh yeah, this is super true of sales. everyone in your sales org needs absurd titles or nobody will ever speak to them. Just one of those things apparently.
- danielvaughn 5y ago
  Yep, indeed. I'm technically the CTO of the startup I'm helping to found. And even though I'm 37, I haven't been in tech long enough to feel like I've earned that title, so my LinkedIn says Chief Software Architect (I made it up).
  - camhart 5y ago
    "It's interesting, these titles," Musk said. "You know that there's actually only three titles that actually mean anything for a corporation? It's president, secretary, and treasurer. And technically they can be the same person. And all these other titles are just basically made up. So CEO is a made-up title, CFO is a made-up title. General counsel, a made-up title. They don't mean anything." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXtjnNWUeAk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXtjnNWUeAk

nimbius 5y ago

id agree with these points, but argue its an everything kind of package that comes within the first year of someone hiring on. whenever I help hire a senior-level engine mechanic or technician for a shop, I need to know they can do the work without a lot of supervision. I also need to know theyll resolve the issues on the shop floor and be able to communicate those issues to a customer as well as a greenhorn tech straight out of a brake shop without chewing them up if its their fault. They need to have the ability to delegate things, get along with people and get the job done. most of all, i dont need the team to see "a new senior mechanic just got hired." I need the team to see a new mechanic and form a consensus that she is senior based on their walk, not my talk. in that first year ill spend more time in the break room sucking down folgers and listening, or just walking the floor stocking ear plugs and soap dispensers and waiting to see what they do.

tom-thistime 5y ago

'Senior Engineer' is just a pay grade. I'm sorry, maybe the world should be a saner place, but that's how it is.

hhlevnjak3 5y ago
And it often just means: most senior person working on this project or for this company. Even if that's 1 or 2 years of experience.
- tom-thistime 5y ago
  It could be that meaningful, but sometimes it's not.

curun1r 5y ago

As someone who has hired a new grad into a “Senior Engineer” role, it meant the title of the salary band that met the candidate’s salary requirements to make our offer competitive with the other offers he received. We wanted to hire a junior role since our team was already relatively senior. But the company’s salary bands were not at all competitive for entry-level developers. So we classed the new hire as senior to make it work. Some companies’ policies are stupid and inflexible and engineers would rather just work around the problem than having to fight against HR.

heyitsanewacco 5y ago
Ding ding ding, we have a winner! I'm running a hiring competition right now for a "Senior." The pay band is less than what entry level startups pay. So we rotate through a never ending stream of kids who leave for better salaries because we don't have any higher levels. Sometimes we do get lucky and pick up a mediocre lifer (like me) so HR sees no incentive to change. Never take a job for a company where you are not on the value chain!
- distrill 5y ago
  > Sometimes we do get lucky and pick up a mediocre lifer (like me) why?
  - trentnix 5y ago
    Maybe he bought a house in the neighborhood. Maybe he really likes writing COBOL. Maybe his spouse works there as well. Maybe he is simply extremely risk averse. There are a number of good reasons somebody might decide to stay put, even if it might be more lucrative or exciting elsewhere.
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    To a lot of people conditions matter more than money.
  - krinchan 5y ago
    Because not everyone feels the need to rate their self-worth by how much wealth they’ve hoarded. I’m already set for retirement and I have my house nearly paid off. I’m comfortable and I don’t make $250,000 a year. I barely work more than 32 hours a week and I just got promoted. Full time work from home with a free working trip back to my old stomping grounds to catch up with friends twice a year. Why would I break my psyche with burnout, stress, and work I despise just to make someone else exponentially more money so I can make marginally more money I don’t need? Miss me with that hustle porn, thanks.

kolla 5y ago

When I read "senior" I often interpret it as "has a lot of experience" which has nothing to do with skill. Speaking for myself who has a shit ton of experience in a lot of tools, techniques, languages and so on but is SHIT in most of them. I'd be hired before a lot of better candidates based on my years of experience in the area but not because of my skill in the area.

zuhayeer 5y ago

We try to map some of these titles across different companies with Levels.fyi We also normalized some of the scope and responsibility definitions for software engineering levels based on what we've seen through company leveling rubrics that we collect: https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html