8 ms·

No, no one calls someone with 5.5 years of experience a junior engineer.

by whiddershins 3y ago

Aeolun 3y ago
That depends entirely on their skill. I’ve seen people with 10 years of experience that were still junior.
- arghwhat 3y ago
  One should definitely have outgrown a junior title after say 3 years of relevant experience, as that is more than sufficient time to be trained into a normal (non-senior) status. It could last longer if your company does not have a normal title (i.e., they consider junior == !senior), but someone with 10 years of relevant experience should have earned a seniority title of some sort.
  - ehnto 3y ago
    I think you have found the issue to be honest, I think most people are expecting to be "senior" in place of "not junior" as soon as they prove they are good programmers. The senior title has been quite diluted by that. Seniority is about experience and not skill in my opinion, we see many talented developers who don't qualify as senior because they simply haven't experienced enough situations. I expect a senior to have some war stories and a breadth of notable situations that they can walk me through, to demonstrate their ability to predict common issues and pitfalls, and to show how their experience helps their troubleshooting and informs their choices. If I had told 20 year old me this, 20 year old me would have balked. 20 year old me was an excellent programmer, but he didn't know shit about long term software development.
    - lowercased 3y ago
      > I expect a senior to have some war stories and a breadth of notable situations that they can walk me through, to demonstrate their ability to predict common issues and pitfalls, and to show how their experience helps their troubleshooting and informs their choices. Yep. I've been doing this for... almost 30 years now, and... interacting with 'seniors' with 2 years of experience is really weird. My recollections from the 90s having worked inside a few places was that 'senior' had a lot more weight/heft to it. It indicated, at the very least, long experience (8-10 years or more) and some ability to at least work with other tech people (non-tech was a bonus). Can't quite figure out when this shift started, but have definitely noticed title inflation as a regular thing over the last 10-15 years. Have you ever taken down a database by mistake? Dealt with bad backups, "on production only" issues, rounding errors in historical data, security breaches, multibyte character set conversion issues? "Coding" is eventually only a small part. Better coding skills up front can help prevent or mitigate some of the potential issues listed above, but only to a point. You're not always even the author of all the code in use; learning how to deal with that, maybe under pressure of "prod is slow/down", has an impact on how you consider these issues going forward. EDIT: tangential story I was at a meetup years ago, and one of the "senior dev/architect" folks at the company hosting the meetup was talking informally about IDEs. I jumped in a bit as I'd recently started with IntelliJ (this was... 2010, I think) and was excited to share a few bits that were new to me. As I listened more, the guy was lecturing the meetup folks that "IDEs were really for juniors and newbs". Specific language is somewhat lost to the mists of time, but the gist was "This is your code, you've written it, you should know it inside and out; fumbling with slow IDE just burns productivity, wastes time, and just shows you don't really know the codebase." I eventually interjected that it might be reasonable for him, personally, to know all the code in a system that he'd built up from scratch over the last 7-8 years. However, for anyone new coming in to the codebase, an IDE is invaluable because it makes the entire thing far more discoverable. Jumping around between sections helps you learn and narrow down bugs/issues much faster. "Well, you should just be asking your senior if you have questions" was the main response, and IDEs were still beneath him. I realized a bit later he was actually giving a small pitch; as host of the meetup, they had an intro period, and they were recruiting. I'd heard about this company before - growing, funded and in a space I had some experience in. Had 0 desire to work there after talking to him. But "the senior architect" always knows best in many places. :/
      - Izkata 3y ago
        > Can't quite figure out when this shift started, but have definitely noticed title inflation as a regular thing over the last 10-15 years. I'll bet it can be tracked down by looking at job-hopping. That's how it happened to me in the early 2010s: I was never told I was promoted to senior developer, one day I was just invited to a meeting for all our senior developers to get opinions on something. I hadn't noticed before, but during the meeting I realized I technically was in the older half of all the devs in the office (in terms of time at the company, not age), just due to all the hiring that had been done in the previous year or two.
    - ryanbrunner 3y ago
      I think the missing piece is the intermediate / non-qualified title. Junior implies to me someone who requires frequent hand-holding and coaching even on small scale tasks. Senior on the other hand should require cross-functional communication skills as well as technical mentorship. There's a huge swath of developers who fit between those (solid individual contributors who aren't necessarily ready to lead a project or mentor).
      - lowercased 3y ago
        "journeyman"? Might be too dated, or too gendered these days, but yeah... some 'not junior' term that just indicates they're "better" (experience or skill or both) than the juniors, but without all the expectations that 'senior' should bring.
        ryanbrunner 3y ago
        I've just always used whatever comes after junior / senior without a qualifier.
        lowercased 3y ago
        I get it, and do too sometimes. For me, this most often comes up when acting as a reference for someone. The hiring person will ask me stuff, and often a 'senior' label question will come up. Almost invariably the person I'm acting as a reference for is beyond 'junior' connotations, and I think have to ask what the hiring person mean by 'senior'. Getting their definition helps me answer most effectively. "Yeah, AB is pretty close to what you class as 'senior'. He's going to work well in a larger group with defined roles and a set schedule, which it sounds like you have." "Well.. SJ is not 'junior' any more, but does need to have someone more senior to help mentor/check in on more advanced topics. If you don't have that - if this is a 'lone wolf' role, they may struggle some".
      - trhr 3y ago
        We have all the titles we need. We have junior for "that guy who can't do a fuckin' thing unless you tell him exactly what to type." We have senior for "that guy who can take a ticket and implement it." We have lead for "that guy who can take a business idea and implement it."
rsynnott 3y ago
Eh, maybe an "engineer", if they have junior, null, senior grades. A lot of places wouldn't consider that sort of experience level automatically senior; they'd have to be exceptional.
- Silhouette 3y ago
  Not automatic but historically a good but not exceptional developer would expect to make senior after maybe 5-8 years of experience. Someone who was still needing close supervision - which is what "junior" traditionally meant - after 5 years would be exceptional and it wouldn't reflect well on either the developer or the places they worked at the start of their career. Of course this is about the level the employee is capable of operating at in absolute terms but hiring is relative. In an employee's market someone might be able to land a "senior" role before they're really ready for it. In an employer's market the average candidate who gets hired as a "senior" might have 10+ YOE. We've gone from one to the other recently and everyone's expectations will need to adjust accordingly.
  - vsareto 3y ago
    This is why software is not a serious profession: it has no consistency in progression and recognition. I think I would drive myself mad if I tried to live up to the crazy expectations of senior from most internet commenters.
    - re-thc 3y ago
      > I think I would drive myself mad if I tried to live up to the crazy expectations of senior from most internet commenters. And maybe that's the point of it. Senior without the title inflations is meant to be an actual high level position - not 50-100% of the company. A lot of places have just replaced senior with staff/principal engineers instead, but senior used to be a well respected and unique title back in the days.
      - Silhouette 3y ago
        I agree with half of what you say. Senior should be a high-level position. It's a recognition of someone with solid skills and the ability to get things done. But suppose a senior is someone who can work mostly autonomously under general direction from their management and tech leadership, which I'd say is a reasonable basic definition of what "senior" level has historically meant in software development. We would expect to see a lot more people reaching that level and sticking around on a tech career path now because of the rapid growth in the industry and the greater awareness that people can be a high-level IC but not have much interest in formal leadership or management roles. Moreover there is no rule that says an employer should hire mostly juniors, some mids and only a few seniors. Good seniors are almost always disproportionately cost-effective if you can manage to hire them. The trend for rapid job-hopping has left juniors as an almost worthless hire in many cases because they probably won't be around long enough to make a good contribution in return for all the early overheads they incur. There is definitely a longer formal tech track in large organisations now. I'd say it used to be more that you reached senior and then any other responsibilities like leading a team or dealing with large-scale software architecture issues were kind of attached. So historically you'd associate those higher responsibilities with "senior" people where today those with the skills and experience to do them probably have higher job titles like lead/staff/principal instead. So I'm not sure senior has been deflated or replaced by staff etc. It's just that senior used to be the top of three levels for many employers but now there's more recognition that your development doesn't just stop after a few years and "senior" today mostly means "first few years as a senior" in old terminology.
cientifico 3y ago
I do, and quite frequently. After more than a 2 decades in software development (rails/web/...), for me to consider a developer to be a senior it needs to: * Communicate: For example: can explain tech concepts to non tech people, or inform on Monday that the sprint will be unlikely to be done in time. * Can estimate and adapt to changes. Be boring and predictable. * Can work/collaborate/teach with other devs. I got tired of interviewing tech people that though that to be senior is the same as to be specialist (or worse even, that it was related with the number of years).
- ZephyrBlu 3y ago
  You think it takes 5+ years to acquire those skills?! Man, I would be driven insane in an environment like that. Such a long time and a relatively low bar.
  - H8crilA 3y ago
    I think the point is that some people don't acquire it within 5 or even more years. Think of a typical checked-out worker, without any specific ambition in professional life. There's plenty of people like that.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Some, possibly even most, never do.
  - reverend_gonzo 3y ago
    I know people with 20y that can’t do that.
  - FemmeAndroid 3y ago
    Not who you’re asking, but it can take almost no time, or decades. It has nothing to do with years.
  - pc86 3y ago
    I have worked with people who have 8-10 years of experience and are still mid-level in both skill and professionalism, know that they are, and are fine with it. They get their joy from other things in life and are totally fine coming into the office and doing the bare minimum to get by and going years without raises or bonuses because of it. Again, this is a conscious choice these people are making, they're not being taken advantage of or anything.
animuchan 3y ago
That's exactly what the parent comment says: title inflation. I sometimes get even funnier CVs, where a person with 2-3 years of experience (usually from the Army) is already in a tech lead / architect position.
- ZephyrBlu 3y ago
  Tech is very strongly bi-modal or even tri-modal in terms of both compensation and skill. Some people with 2-3 YOE will operate better than some people with 10 YOE.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    > Some people with 2-3 YOE will operate better than some people with 10 YOE. That's true of every field, and doesn't really relate to the claim of bimodality. If ability followed a perfect normal distribution, it would still be true that some people with 2-3 years of experience are better than some other people with 10-15 years of experience.
    - ZephyrBlu 3y ago
      In most fields this is extremely rare. In tech it's relatively common. The difference is the kind of environment you're working in (E.g. high growth tech company vs non-tech company) and the learning rate in that environment, which is where the modality comes into play.
      - thaumasiotes 3y ago
        > In most fields this is extremely rare. For example? In pretty much any field I can think of, it is definitely not rare. The norm is that some people pick things up quickly and other people don't. It is normal for good musicians with 3 years of experience to be better than bad musicians with 10 years of experience. It is even more normal for good secretaries with 3 years of experience to be better than bad secretaries with 10. My mother once partnered with a local university to offer students internships clerking in her medical office. She remarked that the students, with their zero years of experience, were more effective in this generic, unskilled role than anyone she was able to hire into it. (Those people had many years of experience.) The partnership with the university wound down and she went back to hiring no-hopers with plenty of experience. According to her, that was the best she could hope to do for the dead-end position she was offering.
washywashy 3y ago
I think the issue is that people sometimes incorrectly assume job titles are standard and used the same across different companies. At some companies titles are more about pay bands. I’ve worked places with a bunch of “senior” engineers, but that was mainly because the company pay bands couldn’t compete with the market for junior engineers so they’d hire them as seniors. It’s bad too because sometimes once an employee gets that title they expect it at other companies even if the experience level isn’t there yet, which limits their mobility because they refuse to take a backward step in their career, even if the pay is better
- scarface_74 3y ago
  I took three backward steps since 2016 - dev lead - non tech company responsible for one “team” of two developers and a bunch of contractors on another team - “Senior Software Engineer” - no reports and I actively refused a promotion to be a team lead. I was already the de facto “cloud architect” over the “application modernization” efforts via no more than influence and reputation. - mid level “cloud consultant” - full time job working remotely at BigTech.
  - disgruntledphd2 3y ago
    As my Dad always said, it doesn't matter what they call you, it matters what they pay you.
shultays 3y ago
I worked with a person for about 3 years (and he had previous experience as well) and I wouldn't even call him a fresh-grad level or trust him more than I trust an intern. Some people are immune to learning
artificialLimbs 3y ago
We have a 14 year junior engineer. She refuses to learn new tech, is difficult to work with, and makes a mean bowl of spaghetti code. She does it so quickly though and has so much institutional knowledge that it’s pretty much mandatory she stays.
- baobabKoodaa 3y ago
  When did we arrive at a point where terms like "junior" became derogatory terms similar to "idiot" or "asshole"? No, you don't have a "14 year junior engineer". You have a senior engineer who is difficult to work with and is (according to you) bad at their job.
  - artificialLimbs 3y ago
    Her official title is literally Junior Engineer with the company. Did I say that it was a derogatory term or use the title idiot or asshole or say they were bad at their job? Bro you should get that chip on your shoulder examined.
    - pcthrowaway 3y ago
      Has she been with your company for 14 years? Because if so, this really calls some of your companies practices somewhere into question. That being said, if she got hired as a junior in the last 5 years (despite tangentially having some programming experience) and never got promoted, I guess I can understand that, but really, why even keep someone on who refuses to learn new things, is difficult to work with, and consistently writes poor code
      - morelisp 3y ago
        Why? Because there are also 14 year junior managers (except they get retitled to something like "team lead")...

No, no one calls someone with 5.5 years of experience a junior engineer.

Aeolun 3y ago

That depends entirely on their skill. I’ve seen people with 10 years of experience that were still junior.

arghwhat 3y ago
One should definitely have outgrown a junior title after say 3 years of relevant experience, as that is more than sufficient time to be trained into a normal (non-senior) status. It could last longer if your company does not have a normal title (i.e., they consider junior == !senior), but someone with 10 years of relevant experience should have earned a seniority title of some sort.
- ehnto 3y ago
  I think you have found the issue to be honest, I think most people are expecting to be "senior" in place of "not junior" as soon as they prove they are good programmers. The senior title has been quite diluted by that. Seniority is about experience and not skill in my opinion, we see many talented developers who don't qualify as senior because they simply haven't experienced enough situations. I expect a senior to have some war stories and a breadth of notable situations that they can walk me through, to demonstrate their ability to predict common issues and pitfalls, and to show how their experience helps their troubleshooting and informs their choices. If I had told 20 year old me this, 20 year old me would have balked. 20 year old me was an excellent programmer, but he didn't know shit about long term software development.
  - lowercased 3y ago
    > I expect a senior to have some war stories and a breadth of notable situations that they can walk me through, to demonstrate their ability to predict common issues and pitfalls, and to show how their experience helps their troubleshooting and informs their choices. Yep. I've been doing this for... almost 30 years now, and... interacting with 'seniors' with 2 years of experience is really weird. My recollections from the 90s having worked inside a few places was that 'senior' had a lot more weight/heft to it. It indicated, at the very least, long experience (8-10 years or more) and some ability to at least work with other tech people (non-tech was a bonus). Can't quite figure out when this shift started, but have definitely noticed title inflation as a regular thing over the last 10-15 years. Have you ever taken down a database by mistake? Dealt with bad backups, "on production only" issues, rounding errors in historical data, security breaches, multibyte character set conversion issues? "Coding" is eventually only a small part. Better coding skills up front can help prevent or mitigate some of the potential issues listed above, but only to a point. You're not always even the author of all the code in use; learning how to deal with that, maybe under pressure of "prod is slow/down", has an impact on how you consider these issues going forward. EDIT: tangential story I was at a meetup years ago, and one of the "senior dev/architect" folks at the company hosting the meetup was talking informally about IDEs. I jumped in a bit as I'd recently started with IntelliJ (this was... 2010, I think) and was excited to share a few bits that were new to me. As I listened more, the guy was lecturing the meetup folks that "IDEs were really for juniors and newbs". Specific language is somewhat lost to the mists of time, but the gist was "This is your code, you've written it, you should know it inside and out; fumbling with slow IDE just burns productivity, wastes time, and just shows you don't really know the codebase." I eventually interjected that it might be reasonable for him, personally, to know all the code in a system that he'd built up from scratch over the last 7-8 years. However, for anyone new coming in to the codebase, an IDE is invaluable because it makes the entire thing far more discoverable. Jumping around between sections helps you learn and narrow down bugs/issues much faster. "Well, you should just be asking your senior if you have questions" was the main response, and IDEs were still beneath him. I realized a bit later he was actually giving a small pitch; as host of the meetup, they had an intro period, and they were recruiting. I'd heard about this company before - growing, funded and in a space I had some experience in. Had 0 desire to work there after talking to him. But "the senior architect" always knows best in many places. :/
    - Izkata 3y ago
      > Can't quite figure out when this shift started, but have definitely noticed title inflation as a regular thing over the last 10-15 years. I'll bet it can be tracked down by looking at job-hopping. That's how it happened to me in the early 2010s: I was never told I was promoted to senior developer, one day I was just invited to a meeting for all our senior developers to get opinions on something. I hadn't noticed before, but during the meeting I realized I technically was in the older half of all the devs in the office (in terms of time at the company, not age), just due to all the hiring that had been done in the previous year or two.
  - ryanbrunner 3y ago
    I think the missing piece is the intermediate / non-qualified title. Junior implies to me someone who requires frequent hand-holding and coaching even on small scale tasks. Senior on the other hand should require cross-functional communication skills as well as technical mentorship. There's a huge swath of developers who fit between those (solid individual contributors who aren't necessarily ready to lead a project or mentor).
    - lowercased 3y ago
      "journeyman"? Might be too dated, or too gendered these days, but yeah... some 'not junior' term that just indicates they're "better" (experience or skill or both) than the juniors, but without all the expectations that 'senior' should bring.
      - ryanbrunner 3y ago
        I've just always used whatever comes after junior / senior without a qualifier.
        lowercased 3y ago
        I get it, and do too sometimes. For me, this most often comes up when acting as a reference for someone. The hiring person will ask me stuff, and often a 'senior' label question will come up. Almost invariably the person I'm acting as a reference for is beyond 'junior' connotations, and I think have to ask what the hiring person mean by 'senior'. Getting their definition helps me answer most effectively. "Yeah, AB is pretty close to what you class as 'senior'. He's going to work well in a larger group with defined roles and a set schedule, which it sounds like you have." "Well.. SJ is not 'junior' any more, but does need to have someone more senior to help mentor/check in on more advanced topics. If you don't have that - if this is a 'lone wolf' role, they may struggle some".
    - trhr 3y ago
      We have all the titles we need. We have junior for "that guy who can't do a fuckin' thing unless you tell him exactly what to type." We have senior for "that guy who can take a ticket and implement it." We have lead for "that guy who can take a business idea and implement it."

rsynnott 3y ago

Eh, maybe an "engineer", if they have junior, null, senior grades. A lot of places wouldn't consider that sort of experience level automatically senior; they'd have to be exceptional.

Silhouette 3y ago
Not automatic but historically a good but not exceptional developer would expect to make senior after maybe 5-8 years of experience. Someone who was still needing close supervision - which is what "junior" traditionally meant - after 5 years would be exceptional and it wouldn't reflect well on either the developer or the places they worked at the start of their career. Of course this is about the level the employee is capable of operating at in absolute terms but hiring is relative. In an employee's market someone might be able to land a "senior" role before they're really ready for it. In an employer's market the average candidate who gets hired as a "senior" might have 10+ YOE. We've gone from one to the other recently and everyone's expectations will need to adjust accordingly.
- vsareto 3y ago
  This is why software is not a serious profession: it has no consistency in progression and recognition. I think I would drive myself mad if I tried to live up to the crazy expectations of senior from most internet commenters.
  - re-thc 3y ago
    > I think I would drive myself mad if I tried to live up to the crazy expectations of senior from most internet commenters. And maybe that's the point of it. Senior without the title inflations is meant to be an actual high level position - not 50-100% of the company. A lot of places have just replaced senior with staff/principal engineers instead, but senior used to be a well respected and unique title back in the days.
    - Silhouette 3y ago
      I agree with half of what you say. Senior should be a high-level position. It's a recognition of someone with solid skills and the ability to get things done. But suppose a senior is someone who can work mostly autonomously under general direction from their management and tech leadership, which I'd say is a reasonable basic definition of what "senior" level has historically meant in software development. We would expect to see a lot more people reaching that level and sticking around on a tech career path now because of the rapid growth in the industry and the greater awareness that people can be a high-level IC but not have much interest in formal leadership or management roles. Moreover there is no rule that says an employer should hire mostly juniors, some mids and only a few seniors. Good seniors are almost always disproportionately cost-effective if you can manage to hire them. The trend for rapid job-hopping has left juniors as an almost worthless hire in many cases because they probably won't be around long enough to make a good contribution in return for all the early overheads they incur. There is definitely a longer formal tech track in large organisations now. I'd say it used to be more that you reached senior and then any other responsibilities like leading a team or dealing with large-scale software architecture issues were kind of attached. So historically you'd associate those higher responsibilities with "senior" people where today those with the skills and experience to do them probably have higher job titles like lead/staff/principal instead. So I'm not sure senior has been deflated or replaced by staff etc. It's just that senior used to be the top of three levels for many employers but now there's more recognition that your development doesn't just stop after a few years and "senior" today mostly means "first few years as a senior" in old terminology.

cientifico 3y ago

I do, and quite frequently. After more than a 2 decades in software development (rails/web/...), for me to consider a developer to be a senior it needs to: * Communicate: For example: can explain tech concepts to non tech people, or inform on Monday that the sprint will be unlikely to be done in time. * Can estimate and adapt to changes. Be boring and predictable. * Can work/collaborate/teach with other devs. I got tired of interviewing tech people that though that to be senior is the same as to be specialist (or worse even, that it was related with the number of years).

ZephyrBlu 3y ago
You think it takes 5+ years to acquire those skills?! Man, I would be driven insane in an environment like that. Such a long time and a relatively low bar.
- H8crilA 3y ago
  I think the point is that some people don't acquire it within 5 or even more years. Think of a typical checked-out worker, without any specific ambition in professional life. There's plenty of people like that.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Some, possibly even most, never do.
- reverend_gonzo 3y ago
  I know people with 20y that can’t do that.
- FemmeAndroid 3y ago
  Not who you’re asking, but it can take almost no time, or decades. It has nothing to do with years.
- pc86 3y ago
  I have worked with people who have 8-10 years of experience and are still mid-level in both skill and professionalism, know that they are, and are fine with it. They get their joy from other things in life and are totally fine coming into the office and doing the bare minimum to get by and going years without raises or bonuses because of it. Again, this is a conscious choice these people are making, they're not being taken advantage of or anything.

animuchan 3y ago

That's exactly what the parent comment says: title inflation. I sometimes get even funnier CVs, where a person with 2-3 years of experience (usually from the Army) is already in a tech lead / architect position.

ZephyrBlu 3y ago
Tech is very strongly bi-modal or even tri-modal in terms of both compensation and skill. Some people with 2-3 YOE will operate better than some people with 10 YOE.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > Some people with 2-3 YOE will operate better than some people with 10 YOE. That's true of every field, and doesn't really relate to the claim of bimodality. If ability followed a perfect normal distribution, it would still be true that some people with 2-3 years of experience are better than some other people with 10-15 years of experience.
  - ZephyrBlu 3y ago
    In most fields this is extremely rare. In tech it's relatively common. The difference is the kind of environment you're working in (E.g. high growth tech company vs non-tech company) and the learning rate in that environment, which is where the modality comes into play.
    - thaumasiotes 3y ago
      > In most fields this is extremely rare. For example? In pretty much any field I can think of, it is definitely not rare. The norm is that some people pick things up quickly and other people don't. It is normal for good musicians with 3 years of experience to be better than bad musicians with 10 years of experience. It is even more normal for good secretaries with 3 years of experience to be better than bad secretaries with 10. My mother once partnered with a local university to offer students internships clerking in her medical office. She remarked that the students, with their zero years of experience, were more effective in this generic, unskilled role than anyone she was able to hire into it. (Those people had many years of experience.) The partnership with the university wound down and she went back to hiring no-hopers with plenty of experience. According to her, that was the best she could hope to do for the dead-end position she was offering.

washywashy 3y ago

I think the issue is that people sometimes incorrectly assume job titles are standard and used the same across different companies. At some companies titles are more about pay bands. I’ve worked places with a bunch of “senior” engineers, but that was mainly because the company pay bands couldn’t compete with the market for junior engineers so they’d hire them as seniors. It’s bad too because sometimes once an employee gets that title they expect it at other companies even if the experience level isn’t there yet, which limits their mobility because they refuse to take a backward step in their career, even if the pay is better

scarface_74 3y ago
I took three backward steps since 2016 - dev lead - non tech company responsible for one “team” of two developers and a bunch of contractors on another team - “Senior Software Engineer” - no reports and I actively refused a promotion to be a team lead. I was already the de facto “cloud architect” over the “application modernization” efforts via no more than influence and reputation. - mid level “cloud consultant” - full time job working remotely at BigTech.
- disgruntledphd2 3y ago
  As my Dad always said, it doesn't matter what they call you, it matters what they pay you.

shultays 3y ago

I worked with a person for about 3 years (and he had previous experience as well) and I wouldn't even call him a fresh-grad level or trust him more than I trust an intern. Some people are immune to learning

artificialLimbs 3y ago

We have a 14 year junior engineer. She refuses to learn new tech, is difficult to work with, and makes a mean bowl of spaghetti code. She does it so quickly though and has so much institutional knowledge that it’s pretty much mandatory she stays.

baobabKoodaa 3y ago
When did we arrive at a point where terms like "junior" became derogatory terms similar to "idiot" or "asshole"? No, you don't have a "14 year junior engineer". You have a senior engineer who is difficult to work with and is (according to you) bad at their job.
- artificialLimbs 3y ago
  Her official title is literally Junior Engineer with the company. Did I say that it was a derogatory term or use the title idiot or asshole or say they were bad at their job? Bro you should get that chip on your shoulder examined.
  - pcthrowaway 3y ago
    Has she been with your company for 14 years? Because if so, this really calls some of your companies practices somewhere into question. That being said, if she got hired as a junior in the last 5 years (despite tangentially having some programming experience) and never got promoted, I guess I can understand that, but really, why even keep someone on who refuses to learn new things, is difficult to work with, and consistently writes poor code
    - morelisp 3y ago
      Why? Because there are also 14 year junior managers (except they get retitled to something like "team lead")...