4 ms·

How many years to senior engineer?

18 points by kiyanwang 3y ago

mnd999 3y ago
> And in the right environment, an engineer can suffer through 10 years of experience in 1 year. No you can’t. Some environments allow you to progress faster than others, but not this fast.
- hardware2win 3y ago
  Indeed, I cannot imagine what image is in authors mind when he talks about 10 years of xp that makes him think that it is possible
therobots927 3y ago
How about this, you’re a senior if a company promotes you to senior or hires you as a senior. And then you have to contend with the reality that the senior role is easier to achieve at some companies because it’s cheaper to give someone a title bump than a compensation bump. I work in an adjacent field (data science) and I’ve met only a few data scientists that I would truly consider deserving of a senior title. Title inflation is a real problem in this industry.
- swyx 3y ago
  you've said two conflicting things here. 1 is "if you have the title you're senior". 2 is "title inflation is real and most don't qualify". i'm much more sanguine about this because you can be senior in some things and non senior in others. everything is a spectrum and also everything is stochastic, just because you have more years of experience in X does not mean you will be better at X going forward because tech changes, needs change, quality of experience matters. all this is well trodden territory so i guess i'm just saying putting a ton of weight on an arbitrary "senior" label does neither you nor the labelee any good
  - therobots927 3y ago
    Well I'm putting weight on it because other people do. The unfortunate thing about the tech industry is that there is no Bar exam and most education is gained from experience so you can't just filter on the quality of the school the engineer went to. It's also an industry full of people who aggressively climb the ladder immediately out of school to maximize their compensation (understandable) but this dilutes the meaning of their title if they aren't actually that good at their jobs. I think there should be a certification agency that certifies people at very high levels in a variety of subjects like python competency.
    - swyx 3y ago
      well you have a hidden opinion here - that a centralized certification agency does better than alternatives. coming from an industry (finance) where the CFA has some bar but is widely known to be not relevant to actual experts, the weight of history is against this. the better alternative is decentralized expertise certification - which already exists, in follower graphs, open source libraries, and word of mouth.
jspash 3y ago
I’ve never worked with someone who had less than 10 years of experience that I would call a senior engineer. However the number of people who claim to be with less than 5 is astounding! Maybe the talent pool in the UK has a serious case of Dunning-Krueger? Whatever the case may be. I find hiring extremely time consuming because I need to wade through so many candidates to find a true senior.
- acjacobson 3y ago
  Very much agree and I also use 10 years as my rough criteria (for PMs though as I am in product)
- hardware2win 3y ago
  Haha, wait untill you hear about those seniors or actually señors with 3 yoe
- therobots927 3y ago
  I generally agree and I think 10 years should be the standard with some exceptions made. Do you mean 10 years of full time experience? What about someone with three years of internship experience in college and 7 years of full time experience after school, who also majored in a relevant subject? That is closer to my career progression and could justify a senior title at around the 6 year mark after college. However it should not be the norm to get senior at 6 years and I think there should be additional guardrails like a universal exam needed to get certified at that level like the Bar exam.
- oaiey 3y ago
  10 is IMHO too much because seniority most of the times stems from soft skills which can develop or be offset in the first place even independent from coding. Also, growth is happening non linearly. But to be clear: I also think that roles like senior engineer are handed out far too easy.
- jstx1 3y ago
  > However the number of people who claim to be with less than 5 is astounding! Senior engineer since when I had less than 5 YOE - I'm not claiming anything, I'm just using the title used by my employer. Nothing good will happen if I remove the "senior" from my title - in some cases it won't make any difference, in others it will actively harm me and make it more difficult to get the attention of certain recruiters and hiring managers. I'm not sure what you expect someone in my situation to do.
jstx1 3y ago
> worked on 1 codebase for at least 3 years I get why you would have this on your list but I'm not planning on staying at a job that I don't like, or with a company that's underpaying me, or insisting to be stuck on the same project for 3 years just so I can meet someone's arbitrary criteria for a senior. And I'm saying arbitrary because: > worked in at least 2 companies (or vastly different teams) > worked on 1 codebase for at least 3 years so 6 months at job 1, and 3 years at job 2 (without changing codebase) makes you senior but 10 years with 4 jobs of 2.5 years each is not senior? This why all of this is pointless gatekeeping - you're senior if you have a senior title. And if you do, it doesn't mean all that much and that's okay.
- hardware2win 3y ago
  >So 6 months at job 1, and 3 years at job 2 (without changing codebase) and you're senior but 10 years with 4 jobs of 2.5 years each is not senior? You're missing the point. It is about exclusion of ppl who jump between projects every 1.x year and have never witnessed whole software development life cycle. How can you evaluate your design if you never witnessed how it matured cuz you are already out by the time this phase comes?
  - jstx1 3y ago
    > It is about exclusion of ppl who jump between projects every 1.x year It's not every 1.x year, the author is excluding everyone who doesn't spend at least 3 years on a project.
    - hardware2win 3y ago
      3 is not some magic constant that comes from physics or something It was just author's number. It may vary by industry, specialization, etc. But the goal is the same
drewcoo 3y ago
Measuring in years is measuring by time served. Am I a prison trustee yet? Measuring with some kind of experience ruler that's likely to be calibrated differently everywhere seems as effective as using horoscopes. And please, before anyone objects to that, I know some of you believe in horoscopes and that' ok. If we're not measuring actual skills then it's meaningless. Like software engineer interviews above entry level. If we do measure actual skills senior staff should have, we have to find ways to measure those "soft skills" that we all like to claim are unimportant but are actually the big differentiator for senior staff. You don't get to be a staff engineer by rote memorization or by being the only person that really understands some tech. Well, except maybe in startups.
swyx 3y ago
> Someone with 1 year of experience 10 times, does not a senior engineer make. And in the right environment, an engineer can suffer through 10 years of experience in 1 year. to give a familiar shorthand to this, I have been describing the "algorithm of career growth" by "Big L notation" https://www.swyx.io/big-l-notation https://www.swyx.io/big-l-notation as a way to convert from years of experience to actual skills/capabilities. people with a very high Big L learn much quicker than those with sublinear Big L. Considering that we only get one life/career it surprises me that more people do not actively design their Big L trajectory.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
oaiey 3y ago
Seniority in my perspective can be measured best in your soft skills. So you need someone to explain you what you need to do. Do you lead other people. Do you teach. Do you self manage your workload. So you report stuff the right way. Do you treat your environment the right way. Do you do the right things. Because coding is something you master once in a sufficient way.
- oaiey 3y ago
  Oh and btw, there are evaluation frameworks for that.
- dagw 3y ago
  At the civil engineering company I used to work for they differentiated between Specialist Engineers and Project Engineers. Senior Project Engineers were people who could lead a team and deliver a project from beginning to end. Senior Specialist Engineers were expected to have a ~PhD level of knowledge in their area of expertise and be able to deliver cutting edge solutions and/or conduct novel research. Also no one was just a "Senior Engineer" they were always "Senior Engineers in X" I think this sort of differentiation between what we expect of our "engineers" is quite useful.
  - oaiey 3y ago
    Oh definitely. Not every specialization has the same requirements focus in seniority. But nevertheless, even in the most technical and domain focus areas, higher ranked roles are always including significant soft skills in one area or another. As an architect my specialization is technology and not people leadership. However, when you build very large solutions as an architect, your soft skills will be the dominant measurement of your seniority. Latest when you sit next to the CEO and CIO, soft skills are the only things which advance your career.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lordnacho 3y ago
I would think he means senior in terms of a certain quality that I'll describe, rather than "can credibly get senior title", which is really just a function of the job market. Senior to me means: - Can dig yourself out of any hole. If you need help, you already have contacts who can point your way. If you need a new language/OS, you are able to understand some things immediately, but you will also know some specifics within a few weeks, since you've seen something similar. You know how to use the internet to find out about anything you come across. Your need to ask new SO questions is absolutely minimal, you can piece things together from other people's questions. You have experience outside of your area: if you're a backend dev, you can still whip up a basic web page, if you're a web dev you still know a few things about memory paging. In either case enough to know where to look for details. - Everything that's industry standard you've either played with or heard of. You've heard of the variants of similar things (postgres, MySQL, Oracle). - You know what the likely architectures for problems are. You know where the landmines are. You have a good idea about what kinds of requirements will blow up the budget. You know which parts are critical and which are peripheral. - You can express why one choice or another is preferable. You understand the tradeoffs in the design. You can translate between business and software land. This last point btw is also the difference between a good lawyer and a not so good one. Given this amorphous mass of vague seniority requirements, my guess is it takes most people 10 years of full time work. You need some time to move around projects to get some variety, and you need time to mature both technically and emotionally. You need time to meet people and get to know them on a technical level too, it's no good just to know other fresh graduates, and realistically many of your matured dev contacts will be people you met early on. I would also say that it's possible to go 10 years without getting all this variety, which is probably a commonly pointed-out thing. But also IMO once you reach this point the curve flattens: your next 10 years are unlikely to expose to something vastly new, and so a 10-year senior and a 20-year senior are not hugely different from each other, though both are vastly different from a 5-year dev.
awelxtr 3y ago
Is it really important? I mean, we are talking about a Title. Any company can give someone the title they want. I know a case of a guy who was Software Engineer at his second job with only 2yr of experience. And trust me, he wasn't a software engineer. Can we trust titles?
Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
Isn't the industry standard 3 years? At least that's when you can begin getting that title.
Joe_Boogz 3y ago
Strongly depends on the company as well. In a big org it can take years of work at a senior level to get that title. And only if there is a “business need”.

18 points by kiyanwang 3y ago

> And in the right environment, an engineer can suffer through 10 years of experience in 1 year. No you can’t. Some environments allow you to progress faster than others, but not this fast.

hardware2win 3y ago
Indeed, I cannot imagine what image is in authors mind when he talks about 10 years of xp that makes him think that it is possible

therobots927 3y ago

How about this, you’re a senior if a company promotes you to senior or hires you as a senior. And then you have to contend with the reality that the senior role is easier to achieve at some companies because it’s cheaper to give someone a title bump than a compensation bump. I work in an adjacent field (data science) and I’ve met only a few data scientists that I would truly consider deserving of a senior title. Title inflation is a real problem in this industry.

swyx 3y ago
you've said two conflicting things here. 1 is "if you have the title you're senior". 2 is "title inflation is real and most don't qualify". i'm much more sanguine about this because you can be senior in some things and non senior in others. everything is a spectrum and also everything is stochastic, just because you have more years of experience in X does not mean you will be better at X going forward because tech changes, needs change, quality of experience matters. all this is well trodden territory so i guess i'm just saying putting a ton of weight on an arbitrary "senior" label does neither you nor the labelee any good
- therobots927 3y ago
  Well I'm putting weight on it because other people do. The unfortunate thing about the tech industry is that there is no Bar exam and most education is gained from experience so you can't just filter on the quality of the school the engineer went to. It's also an industry full of people who aggressively climb the ladder immediately out of school to maximize their compensation (understandable) but this dilutes the meaning of their title if they aren't actually that good at their jobs. I think there should be a certification agency that certifies people at very high levels in a variety of subjects like python competency.
  - swyx 3y ago
    well you have a hidden opinion here - that a centralized certification agency does better than alternatives. coming from an industry (finance) where the CFA has some bar but is widely known to be not relevant to actual experts, the weight of history is against this. the better alternative is decentralized expertise certification - which already exists, in follower graphs, open source libraries, and word of mouth.

jspash 3y ago

I’ve never worked with someone who had less than 10 years of experience that I would call a senior engineer. However the number of people who claim to be with less than 5 is astounding! Maybe the talent pool in the UK has a serious case of Dunning-Krueger? Whatever the case may be. I find hiring extremely time consuming because I need to wade through so many candidates to find a true senior.

acjacobson 3y ago
Very much agree and I also use 10 years as my rough criteria (for PMs though as I am in product)
hardware2win 3y ago
Haha, wait untill you hear about those seniors or actually señors with 3 yoe
therobots927 3y ago
I generally agree and I think 10 years should be the standard with some exceptions made. Do you mean 10 years of full time experience? What about someone with three years of internship experience in college and 7 years of full time experience after school, who also majored in a relevant subject? That is closer to my career progression and could justify a senior title at around the 6 year mark after college. However it should not be the norm to get senior at 6 years and I think there should be additional guardrails like a universal exam needed to get certified at that level like the Bar exam.
oaiey 3y ago
10 is IMHO too much because seniority most of the times stems from soft skills which can develop or be offset in the first place even independent from coding. Also, growth is happening non linearly. But to be clear: I also think that roles like senior engineer are handed out far too easy.
jstx1 3y ago
> However the number of people who claim to be with less than 5 is astounding! Senior engineer since when I had less than 5 YOE - I'm not claiming anything, I'm just using the title used by my employer. Nothing good will happen if I remove the "senior" from my title - in some cases it won't make any difference, in others it will actively harm me and make it more difficult to get the attention of certain recruiters and hiring managers. I'm not sure what you expect someone in my situation to do.

jstx1 3y ago

> worked on 1 codebase for at least 3 years I get why you would have this on your list but I'm not planning on staying at a job that I don't like, or with a company that's underpaying me, or insisting to be stuck on the same project for 3 years just so I can meet someone's arbitrary criteria for a senior. And I'm saying arbitrary because: > worked in at least 2 companies (or vastly different teams) > worked on 1 codebase for at least 3 years so 6 months at job 1, and 3 years at job 2 (without changing codebase) makes you senior but 10 years with 4 jobs of 2.5 years each is not senior? This why all of this is pointless gatekeeping - you're senior if you have a senior title. And if you do, it doesn't mean all that much and that's okay.

hardware2win 3y ago
>So 6 months at job 1, and 3 years at job 2 (without changing codebase) and you're senior but 10 years with 4 jobs of 2.5 years each is not senior? You're missing the point. It is about exclusion of ppl who jump between projects every 1.x year and have never witnessed whole software development life cycle. How can you evaluate your design if you never witnessed how it matured cuz you are already out by the time this phase comes?
- jstx1 3y ago
  > It is about exclusion of ppl who jump between projects every 1.x year It's not every 1.x year, the author is excluding everyone who doesn't spend at least 3 years on a project.
  - hardware2win 3y ago
    3 is not some magic constant that comes from physics or something It was just author's number. It may vary by industry, specialization, etc. But the goal is the same

drewcoo 3y ago

Measuring in years is measuring by time served. Am I a prison trustee yet? Measuring with some kind of experience ruler that's likely to be calibrated differently everywhere seems as effective as using horoscopes. And please, before anyone objects to that, I know some of you believe in horoscopes and that' ok. If we're not measuring actual skills then it's meaningless. Like software engineer interviews above entry level. If we do measure actual skills senior staff should have, we have to find ways to measure those "soft skills" that we all like to claim are unimportant but are actually the big differentiator for senior staff. You don't get to be a staff engineer by rote memorization or by being the only person that really understands some tech. Well, except maybe in startups.

swyx 3y ago

> Someone with 1 year of experience 10 times, does not a senior engineer make. And in the right environment, an engineer can suffer through 10 years of experience in 1 year. to give a familiar shorthand to this, I have been describing the "algorithm of career growth" by "Big L notation" https://www.swyx.io/big-l-notation https://www.swyx.io/big-l-notation as a way to convert from years of experience to actual skills/capabilities. people with a very high Big L learn much quicker than those with sublinear Big L. Considering that we only get one life/career it surprises me that more people do not actively design their Big L trajectory.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

oaiey 3y ago

Seniority in my perspective can be measured best in your soft skills. So you need someone to explain you what you need to do. Do you lead other people. Do you teach. Do you self manage your workload. So you report stuff the right way. Do you treat your environment the right way. Do you do the right things. Because coding is something you master once in a sufficient way.

oaiey 3y ago
Oh and btw, there are evaluation frameworks for that.
dagw 3y ago
At the civil engineering company I used to work for they differentiated between Specialist Engineers and Project Engineers. Senior Project Engineers were people who could lead a team and deliver a project from beginning to end. Senior Specialist Engineers were expected to have a ~PhD level of knowledge in their area of expertise and be able to deliver cutting edge solutions and/or conduct novel research. Also no one was just a "Senior Engineer" they were always "Senior Engineers in X" I think this sort of differentiation between what we expect of our "engineers" is quite useful.
- oaiey 3y ago
  Oh definitely. Not every specialization has the same requirements focus in seniority. But nevertheless, even in the most technical and domain focus areas, higher ranked roles are always including significant soft skills in one area or another. As an architect my specialization is technology and not people leadership. However, when you build very large solutions as an architect, your soft skills will be the dominant measurement of your seniority. Latest when you sit next to the CEO and CIO, soft skills are the only things which advance your career.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

lordnacho 3y ago

I would think he means senior in terms of a certain quality that I'll describe, rather than "can credibly get senior title", which is really just a function of the job market. Senior to me means: - Can dig yourself out of any hole. If you need help, you already have contacts who can point your way. If you need a new language/OS, you are able to understand some things immediately, but you will also know some specifics within a few weeks, since you've seen something similar. You know how to use the internet to find out about anything you come across. Your need to ask new SO questions is absolutely minimal, you can piece things together from other people's questions. You have experience outside of your area: if you're a backend dev, you can still whip up a basic web page, if you're a web dev you still know a few things about memory paging. In either case enough to know where to look for details. - Everything that's industry standard you've either played with or heard of. You've heard of the variants of similar things (postgres, MySQL, Oracle). - You know what the likely architectures for problems are. You know where the landmines are. You have a good idea about what kinds of requirements will blow up the budget. You know which parts are critical and which are peripheral. - You can express why one choice or another is preferable. You understand the tradeoffs in the design. You can translate between business and software land. This last point btw is also the difference between a good lawyer and a not so good one. Given this amorphous mass of vague seniority requirements, my guess is it takes most people 10 years of full time work. You need some time to move around projects to get some variety, and you need time to mature both technically and emotionally. You need time to meet people and get to know them on a technical level too, it's no good just to know other fresh graduates, and realistically many of your matured dev contacts will be people you met early on. I would also say that it's possible to go 10 years without getting all this variety, which is probably a commonly pointed-out thing. But also IMO once you reach this point the curve flattens: your next 10 years are unlikely to expose to something vastly new, and so a 10-year senior and a 20-year senior are not hugely different from each other, though both are vastly different from a 5-year dev.

awelxtr 3y ago

Is it really important? I mean, we are talking about a Title. Any company can give someone the title they want. I know a case of a guy who was Software Engineer at his second job with only 2yr of experience. And trust me, he wasn't a software engineer. Can we trust titles?

Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago

Isn't the industry standard 3 years? At least that's when you can begin getting that title.

Joe_Boogz 3y ago

Strongly depends on the company as well. In a big org it can take years of work at a senior level to get that title. And only if there is a “business need”.