7 ms·

> senior engineer > been a professional engineer for 6 years Man, the software world is just weird.

dom96 4y ago
There are senior engineers out there that have <4 years professional experience. I myself went from IC3 (junior) to IC5 (senior) at FB in around 3 years and this is pretty common at FB from what I've seen.
- kasey_junk 4y ago
  I think the concern is that the industry, including Facebook, has decided that the designation “senior” is a thing you can get in <5 years. It’s a norm in software so it’s easy to see examples of it, and in practice who cares what the titles were if they are used consistently. But what if you were outside the industry and heard that term? A senior judge typically has decades under their belt. A senior chief petty officer is the second highest non-commissioned rank in the navy implying a whole career behind them. They might infer it only takes three years of experience to reach the near top of the software craft.
  - polio 4y ago
    It feels similar to the title bloat of Goldman Sachs, where a lot of people are Vice Presidents.
    - kasey_junk 4y ago
      In certain regulated or audited environments you’ll see rules like “only a person at the VP level or higher can make decision xyz”. It’s just as stupid but there is a different reason for it.
  - joshuamorton 4y ago
    > A senior judge typically has decades under their belt. A senior judge is also quite literally a semi-retirement role. You take on reduced workload. > But what if you were outside the industry and heard that term? "Senior Associates" in the legal profession are junior/mid roles, similarly, senior account managers etc. aren't particularly senior in most places. In white collar roles, a "senior" is really just a distinction of independence and reliability.
thom 4y ago
I suspect 'Senior' most places just means 'more senior than at least one other person'.
Cwizard 4y ago
I’ve worked with some consultants that were ‘senior’ after 2-3 years of experience. I think there are two reasons for this trend: giving some a senior title can sometimes mean you have to pay them less (paradoxically perhaps) because they feel they are more important now, second consultancy agencies can ask higher rates for ‘seniors’.
mierz00 4y ago
Is it really that weird? In the military 6 years is definitely considered senior and I’m sure that’s also the case in a lot of other fields.
- fake-name 4y ago
  I know the EE & ME worlds, senior generally implies at least two decades of experience. I'm pretty sure the same is also true for civil engineering, and most of the other "hard" engineering practices. It seems like (at least outside of the military) the duration to being senior and the importance of things not going wrong are correlated.
  - ReadTheLicense 4y ago
    The meaning is different. In software industry, senior means "doesn't need handholding", not "super-super-long experience" as in other more traditional fields.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      I expect more than that, a senior should be in the position of accomplishing a task based on a ruff abstract, they should also be able to mentor juniors and jump into meetings with the customer, supporting architects and sales, if needed.
  - tiahura 4y ago
- BerislavLopac 4y ago
  I think a part of this issue is that there is nothing above senior. Additionally, "seniority" is relative and can vary between different technologies: for example, I have been working as a software engineer for 25+ years, and while I have worked with Java before I am no better at it than someone who just graduated. Similarly, even though I spent nearly a decade as a frontend dev, the last time I did that professionally was in mid-aughts, and I have zero experience with React, TypeScript and other modern staples of that area.
mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
Easy to be a senior frontend engineer. Just say you were already around when the current most hyped JS framework was released that everyone must move to, 1-2 years ago.
- ReadTheLicense 4y ago
  You mean like React (9 years ago), Angular (12 years ago) or Vue (8 years ago)? Who seriously uses anything else? I think you confused the JS ecosystem with the C# one.
  - tester756 4y ago
    >I think you confused the JS ecosystem with the C# one. What do you mean?
  - jaywalk 4y ago
    Angular will turn 6 years old next month. You're thinking of AngularJS, which despite the (unfortunately) similar name and parent, is basically a completely different framework. Although I don't see why you're bashing C#. Despite the .NET Framework > .NET Core > .NET transitions, it's not really that different. There's a ton of new functionality and ways to do things, but for the most part the old ways still work too.
neilv 4y ago
For software developers, I've thought 5 years of solid work and continuous learning is about the right time horizon for a senior title, in a typical contemporary software/internet company. (At least, 5 years of seeing the lifecycle through awhile -- not job-hopping repeatedly, before getting to see cause and effect together.) I could even see that going faster than 5 years, especially in a startup. For example, say one of your early hires is fresh out of school, but really curious and learning fast, already did some open source, learns from mentoring/osmosis, takes easily to a team sensibility, and has to tackle a lot of things like is the norm in a startup. Within a couple years, as the startup is starting to think about titles more, they might be a battle-scarred veteran with firsthand experience and maturity beyond their years. (Or, even if not everything is yet the complete senior package -- such as maybe they've only worked on one system and team, and could've overlearned from limited data points -- you want to acknowledge the value of their contributions, as well as their institutional memory and cultural role. So maybe help them level up any aspect they haven't yet had a chance to.) (BTW, I avoid the term "professional engineer" when talking about software, because I've heard it have special meaning in the more regulated, traditional engineering disciplines.)
- zero_shift 4y ago
  I absolutely cannot agree with this. It's true that after five years in a startup, you'll have seen lots of systems. But being a senior practitioner requires deep experience as well as breadth, and enough time in the industry to recognise larger trends. There is no magic mark for this, and it's quite possible to reach ten years and still be a weak practitioner, because you were exposed to a narrow range of problems and were never around to see your bad decisions bear bad fruit. However, the opposite does not hold. It doesn't matter how intelligent you are, you can't short circuit repeated experience and the mix of breadth and depth required. People want to. I wanted to. But I didn't: all I became was an overbearing mid who had the rhetoric (and the OSS contributions!) to convince others I knew what I was doing. There is absolutely no comparison between myself in 2017 and myself in 2022, but we both have a job title of "Senior Engineer". In fact, I think that in the long term the trend is for the senior bar to get _higher_. This is pushed by two things: firstly, that the technical domain gets harder, software becomes more abstract, our expectation of engineers increases particularly in "left shifted" environments where every IC must do everything from frontend to microservices to infra to security to testing. The second force is demographic: as IC salaries have increased, there has been less pressure for senior engineers to exit in favour of the management track. That means more experienced engineers on average. Industry needs a way to describe these practitioners, beyond "very senior", and overall the range of skills of ICs will widen. Under those conditions the definition of senior engineer gets more exclusive, not less.
nhoughto 4y ago
Maybe I'm the outlier but at >15 years into this job I think back on what I was like/did/thought 6 years in and shudder, at that point I never mentored anyone my junior seriously enough to influence their perception (I don't think) but if I did I'm not sure it would have been a positive influence. The lack of failures, felt pain, time to reflect.. in combination with the hubris of 20-smth youth isn't a recipe for good software engineering I don't think.
lopkeny12ko 4y ago
Yeah, I stopped reading after this line. Sorry, but if you call yourself "senior" with 6 years of experience you've lost all credibility in my book.
- wink 4y ago
  The author said that, we don't know if the mentioned person does it.
- throwaway4233 4y ago
  Seniority is the fact or state of being older or higher in rank or status than someone else. Within an organisation, a senior engineer could be the engineer with the most experience with the codebase everyone else is working on. I do agree that certain habits or experience from working for additional years might be missing, but as the first engineer of a codebase, IMO, there will always be something to learn from them. Which makes the article credible enough to warrant a read.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  Years of professional experience isn't a great metric of time steeped in software practices. There's a difference between someone who did a bootcamp and worked for 6 years compared to someone who started contributing to open source software at the age of 12, studied computer science, and then went into the industry. The latter might be more experienced at 1 year than the boot camp grad at 6 years.
- runevault 4y ago
  I wouldn't instantly go that far. There are people who can be senior in 6 years. People truly that good are the exception, not the rule though.
- MikeTheRocker 4y ago
  Much of the most widely used software in the world comes out of mid 20s so-called Senior Engineers in Silicon Valley (and other major US metros). Gatekeeping on the basis of years of experience is naive and unproductive. IMO "senior" is a function of behavior not time. At FAANG, levels are formally defined by traits. For example, a senior engineer can plan and lead 6-12 month long projects, delegating some parts of the implementation to others where appropriate. I personally was fulfilling this definition at 25 and I know several dozen others in similar situations.
tiahura 4y ago

There are senior engineers out there that have <4 years professional experience. I myself went from IC3 (junior) to IC5 (senior) at FB in around 3 years and this is pretty common at FB from what I've seen.

kasey_junk 4y ago
I think the concern is that the industry, including Facebook, has decided that the designation “senior” is a thing you can get in <5 years. It’s a norm in software so it’s easy to see examples of it, and in practice who cares what the titles were if they are used consistently. But what if you were outside the industry and heard that term? A senior judge typically has decades under their belt. A senior chief petty officer is the second highest non-commissioned rank in the navy implying a whole career behind them. They might infer it only takes three years of experience to reach the near top of the software craft.
- polio 4y ago
  It feels similar to the title bloat of Goldman Sachs, where a lot of people are Vice Presidents.
  - kasey_junk 4y ago
    In certain regulated or audited environments you’ll see rules like “only a person at the VP level or higher can make decision xyz”. It’s just as stupid but there is a different reason for it.
- joshuamorton 4y ago
  > A senior judge typically has decades under their belt. A senior judge is also quite literally a semi-retirement role. You take on reduced workload. > But what if you were outside the industry and heard that term? "Senior Associates" in the legal profession are junior/mid roles, similarly, senior account managers etc. aren't particularly senior in most places. In white collar roles, a "senior" is really just a distinction of independence and reliability.

thom 4y ago

I suspect 'Senior' most places just means 'more senior than at least one other person'.

Cwizard 4y ago

I’ve worked with some consultants that were ‘senior’ after 2-3 years of experience. I think there are two reasons for this trend: giving some a senior title can sometimes mean you have to pay them less (paradoxically perhaps) because they feel they are more important now, second consultancy agencies can ask higher rates for ‘seniors’.

mierz00 4y ago

Is it really that weird? In the military 6 years is definitely considered senior and I’m sure that’s also the case in a lot of other fields.

fake-name 4y ago
I know the EE & ME worlds, senior generally implies at least two decades of experience. I'm pretty sure the same is also true for civil engineering, and most of the other "hard" engineering practices. It seems like (at least outside of the military) the duration to being senior and the importance of things not going wrong are correlated.
- ReadTheLicense 4y ago
  The meaning is different. In software industry, senior means "doesn't need handholding", not "super-super-long experience" as in other more traditional fields.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    I expect more than that, a senior should be in the position of accomplishing a task based on a ruff abstract, they should also be able to mentor juniors and jump into meetings with the customer, supporting architects and sales, if needed.
- tiahura 4y ago
BerislavLopac 4y ago
I think a part of this issue is that there is nothing above senior. Additionally, "seniority" is relative and can vary between different technologies: for example, I have been working as a software engineer for 25+ years, and while I have worked with Java before I am no better at it than someone who just graduated. Similarly, even though I spent nearly a decade as a frontend dev, the last time I did that professionally was in mid-aughts, and I have zero experience with React, TypeScript and other modern staples of that area.

mudrockbestgirl 4y ago

Easy to be a senior frontend engineer. Just say you were already around when the current most hyped JS framework was released that everyone must move to, 1-2 years ago.

ReadTheLicense 4y ago
You mean like React (9 years ago), Angular (12 years ago) or Vue (8 years ago)? Who seriously uses anything else? I think you confused the JS ecosystem with the C# one.
- tester756 4y ago
  >I think you confused the JS ecosystem with the C# one. What do you mean?
- jaywalk 4y ago
  Angular will turn 6 years old next month. You're thinking of AngularJS, which despite the (unfortunately) similar name and parent, is basically a completely different framework. Although I don't see why you're bashing C#. Despite the .NET Framework > .NET Core > .NET transitions, it's not really that different. There's a ton of new functionality and ways to do things, but for the most part the old ways still work too.

neilv 4y ago

For software developers, I've thought 5 years of solid work and continuous learning is about the right time horizon for a senior title, in a typical contemporary software/internet company. (At least, 5 years of seeing the lifecycle through awhile -- not job-hopping repeatedly, before getting to see cause and effect together.) I could even see that going faster than 5 years, especially in a startup. For example, say one of your early hires is fresh out of school, but really curious and learning fast, already did some open source, learns from mentoring/osmosis, takes easily to a team sensibility, and has to tackle a lot of things like is the norm in a startup. Within a couple years, as the startup is starting to think about titles more, they might be a battle-scarred veteran with firsthand experience and maturity beyond their years. (Or, even if not everything is yet the complete senior package -- such as maybe they've only worked on one system and team, and could've overlearned from limited data points -- you want to acknowledge the value of their contributions, as well as their institutional memory and cultural role. So maybe help them level up any aspect they haven't yet had a chance to.) (BTW, I avoid the term "professional engineer" when talking about software, because I've heard it have special meaning in the more regulated, traditional engineering disciplines.)

zero_shift 4y ago
I absolutely cannot agree with this. It's true that after five years in a startup, you'll have seen lots of systems. But being a senior practitioner requires deep experience as well as breadth, and enough time in the industry to recognise larger trends. There is no magic mark for this, and it's quite possible to reach ten years and still be a weak practitioner, because you were exposed to a narrow range of problems and were never around to see your bad decisions bear bad fruit. However, the opposite does not hold. It doesn't matter how intelligent you are, you can't short circuit repeated experience and the mix of breadth and depth required. People want to. I wanted to. But I didn't: all I became was an overbearing mid who had the rhetoric (and the OSS contributions!) to convince others I knew what I was doing. There is absolutely no comparison between myself in 2017 and myself in 2022, but we both have a job title of "Senior Engineer". In fact, I think that in the long term the trend is for the senior bar to get _higher_. This is pushed by two things: firstly, that the technical domain gets harder, software becomes more abstract, our expectation of engineers increases particularly in "left shifted" environments where every IC must do everything from frontend to microservices to infra to security to testing. The second force is demographic: as IC salaries have increased, there has been less pressure for senior engineers to exit in favour of the management track. That means more experienced engineers on average. Industry needs a way to describe these practitioners, beyond "very senior", and overall the range of skills of ICs will widen. Under those conditions the definition of senior engineer gets more exclusive, not less.

nhoughto 4y ago

Maybe I'm the outlier but at >15 years into this job I think back on what I was like/did/thought 6 years in and shudder, at that point I never mentored anyone my junior seriously enough to influence their perception (I don't think) but if I did I'm not sure it would have been a positive influence. The lack of failures, felt pain, time to reflect.. in combination with the hubris of 20-smth youth isn't a recipe for good software engineering I don't think.

lopkeny12ko 4y ago

Yeah, I stopped reading after this line. Sorry, but if you call yourself "senior" with 6 years of experience you've lost all credibility in my book.

wink 4y ago
The author said that, we don't know if the mentioned person does it.
throwaway4233 4y ago
Seniority is the fact or state of being older or higher in rank or status than someone else. Within an organisation, a senior engineer could be the engineer with the most experience with the codebase everyone else is working on. I do agree that certain habits or experience from working for additional years might be missing, but as the first engineer of a codebase, IMO, there will always be something to learn from them. Which makes the article credible enough to warrant a read.
pcthrowaway 4y ago
Years of professional experience isn't a great metric of time steeped in software practices. There's a difference between someone who did a bootcamp and worked for 6 years compared to someone who started contributing to open source software at the age of 12, studied computer science, and then went into the industry. The latter might be more experienced at 1 year than the boot camp grad at 6 years.
runevault 4y ago
I wouldn't instantly go that far. There are people who can be senior in 6 years. People truly that good are the exception, not the rule though.
MikeTheRocker 4y ago
Much of the most widely used software in the world comes out of mid 20s so-called Senior Engineers in Silicon Valley (and other major US metros). Gatekeeping on the basis of years of experience is naive and unproductive. IMO "senior" is a function of behavior not time. At FAANG, levels are formally defined by traits. For example, a senior engineer can plan and lead 6-12 month long projects, delegating some parts of the implementation to others where appropriate. I personally was fulfilling this definition at 25 and I know several dozen others in similar situations.

tiahura 4y ago