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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

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.

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.