4 ms·
Probably one of the questions here is how your company defines Senior. I’ll assume we actually mean “senior” and not “We give out senior to anyone with more tha
by d_watt 5y ago
Probably one of the questions here is how your company defines Senior. I’ll assume we actually mean “senior” and not “We give out senior to anyone with more than 3 years of experience because the title make it easier to hire.”
I don’t think those requirements are very much for senior. The first four bullets are “can you own your code through into production,” and the last one is critical to build a healthy organization that can build up new people.
Honestly, if anything I feel like there’s a trend to expect less from developers because the market is so tight, you can’t push people to grow for fear they’ll jump ship. Many developers are allowed to become “advanced beginners” where they’re just getting really good at one small part of the stack.
And if that’s all you want, to be a badass (React Dev | Golang Dev | SRE) etc, that’s fine, but unless you’re truly at a company massive enough to support deep specialization, that’s not being senior.
- chrismeller 5y agoThank you! I’m so sick of interviewing “senior” devs that have 3 years of experience at two companies. Similarly I’m sick of companies qualifying you as senior after similar time periods. What happened to those of us with 20 years of experience?
- hn_version_0023 5y agoI suspect that agism has forced many into early retirement or management. Its sooo much easier to take advantage of young human resources, right? (I kid, but I also suspect there’s a tiny bit of truth in there)
- lupire 5y ago> 20 years of experience? Staff, Principal, Fellow, or Manager. Seniors also exist in college and high school.
- hackerfromthefu 5y agoI agree very much, a few years commercial experience really means not junior anymore, but mid level. Most people with only a few years experience are lacking depth and well roundedness to have tried things different ways and be able to swap their approach to the circumstances. Thus they aren't that good at selecting appropriate tradeoffs and guiding to more efficient approaches, as someone more senior can be. Instead most people with only say three year only have deep knowledge of one language without breadth, and are unaware of so much of the history and alternatives in our industry that they don't have the kind of flexibility to really make informed choices. Thus the massive prevalence of cargo culting, resume driven development, and fud in the industry. Regarding a true senior, I agree they should have a working knowledge of the aspects mentioned, as they are about providing for the 'full lifecycle' of systems. They should also understand other things related to a full lifecycle, like TDD + integration + manual testing to provide reliable systems, and live support, and engineering systems in such a way they can be effectively supported, and how to identify requirements clearly, communicate and operate effectively in teams between the various roles etc. Typically this comes in the 5-10 year hands on experience range, while mastery occurs in 10-15 years. However everyone is different, some people go (a little bit) faster than this and some slower. However financial incentives get most people to elevate their titles, while the actual skills take more time. This is based on my observations of about 25 year in the development industry as a dev, lead, architect manager and director/cto. My 'opinion' of course.
- mavelikara 5y ago> What happened to those of us with 20 years of experience? If you are contributing purely by writing code for projects, it is still "senior" - maybe a senior "senior". If you are contributing a higher level value, as the sibling comment mentions, there are other titles like "Staff", "Principal", "Fellow", "Distinguished Engineer" etc.