3 ms·

The vast majority of devs are under 30. Already most people are "senior" after 5 years experience. What are we going to do when this cohort wants to get promote

by rr808 3y ago

The vast majority of devs are under 30. Already most people are "senior" after 5 years experience. What are we going to do when this cohort wants to get promoted into architects and managers in 10-20 years time? There just aren't enough senior jobs.

deebosong 3y ago
Just make up new titles. Super Senior. Super Senior II. Hyper Senior II Turbo. Super Senior: Ultra Instinct.
- The_Blade 3y ago
  Sandhill Road Fighter 6 Turbo! Guile still slaps
- andy99 3y ago
  You're making a joke (and the reference is great) but this is actually what happens. It's where the idea of "Lead" came from, and in many other industries it's much worse. It's why in business there's "(Acting) Associate Senior Execuitve Global Managing Director, Clients and Markets" type positions, so nobody can definitively compare themselves to one another ("oh, so you'll be reporting to me") and people can feel like they're moving up, instead of just being called "manager" or whatever and understanding it's a wide band. And you missed Championship Edition.
  - apimade 3y ago
    VP’s at Goldman being 25 year olds with 3 years experience is hilarious.
    - keernan 3y ago
      I don't know Goldman at all, but I know there are plenty of corporations engaging in labor fraud by giving everyone and the kitchen sink the title of "Vice President" because of the benefits under the labor laws. Doing so is fraud if it is clear the title is given to hundreds, if not thousands, of employees who actually perform no functions that warrant an executive title. I worked at a Fortune 500 company with a total workforce ~10,000 of whom ~50% had the title of Vice President and another ~25% Assistant Vice President.
ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
What do we do when they all want to be CEO after that? It's just a reality that promotions are limited and not guaranteed, and that reality becomes harsher the higher one climbs. Also, many people don't want the leadership and organizational responsibilities that come with being promoted higher (less coding, more politics, less working by yourself, more working through others' hands, etc.)
philjohn 3y ago
Staff and above are fundamentally different jobs to Senior, which is why Senior is a terminal level at most companies. It's about scaling yourself through others, and not everyone wants to do that, and that's OK.
- frewr 3y ago
  It's not fundamentally different, and all engineers should be scaling their impact. Staff engineers who think like this tend to be the most useless engineers, since they eschew real work in favor of appearing politically powerful with lots of cross-team impact. Scaling impact is good, but real work often requires being deep in the trenches. The engineering ladder is one of the worst things to happen to this industry. Sometimes cross-team is the easy stuff, and solving some deep technical issue has the most impact. People here hate leetcode and IQ tests but they are far better filters than "job level" where I've seen many principal engineers failing to write basic code.
  - Yoric 3y ago
    I'm a staff engineer. My work is quite different from what I did as a senior. I spend much more time investigating/solving organizational problems, attempting to make knowledge available cross-teams, extracting requirements from existing projects, proposing new projects, etc. When I'm not doing that, I'm working on deep technical issues, but I already did that as a senior/tech lead.
pjot 3y ago
> What are we going to do We’ll probably just pay them more.
frfl 3y ago
> cohort wants to get promoted into architects and managers in 10-20 years time? Architect is a different role than a dev, assuming dev means programmer/coder/software developer/software engineer. Manager is a completely different career path. No every dev wants to change their role into a non-dev. Some will, some will and will end up going back. > There just aren't enough senior jobs Well the job will change. New teams, products, companies will come and go. No one stays at one company anymore -- okay that may be an exaggeration but very rarely do you see one person working a single job in this industry for 20-30-40 years anymore.
baq 3y ago
Lots of people don't progress past senior... ever. They don't have to, don't feel like fighting for that promotion or just plain aren't good enough.
davidreisbr 3y ago
As with any scarce resource, the most effective people will get them. This piece is to help people be marginally more effective and be one of the ones that gets it. PS: your question assumes stable demand for software engineer, but I'm completely uncertain whether it will grow stay flat or disappear. It all will depend on how AI goes, as well and overall economic development and digitization of the economy.
Aurornis 3y ago
> The vast majority of devs are under 30. How do you arrive at this conclusion? “Under 30” but old enough to have graduated college leaves only ~8 years of career. Unless you think the majority of devs are retiring before the age of 45-50, this doesn’t make sense at all. I think you might be in a bubble with a lot of young devs, but it’s a big industry out there. Devs don’t just disappear or retire when we hit our 30s. They’re probably just at different companies.
- Yoric 3y ago
  Anecdotally, I've been one of the oldest developers in my companies since I started in the industry. I have no idea where old developers go, but it's starting to feel a bit lonely here.

by rr808 3y ago

deebosong 3y ago

Just make up new titles. Super Senior. Super Senior II. Hyper Senior II Turbo. Super Senior: Ultra Instinct.

The_Blade 3y ago
Sandhill Road Fighter 6 Turbo! Guile still slaps
andy99 3y ago
You're making a joke (and the reference is great) but this is actually what happens. It's where the idea of "Lead" came from, and in many other industries it's much worse. It's why in business there's "(Acting) Associate Senior Execuitve Global Managing Director, Clients and Markets" type positions, so nobody can definitively compare themselves to one another ("oh, so you'll be reporting to me") and people can feel like they're moving up, instead of just being called "manager" or whatever and understanding it's a wide band. And you missed Championship Edition.
- apimade 3y ago
  VP’s at Goldman being 25 year olds with 3 years experience is hilarious.
  - keernan 3y ago
    I don't know Goldman at all, but I know there are plenty of corporations engaging in labor fraud by giving everyone and the kitchen sink the title of "Vice President" because of the benefits under the labor laws. Doing so is fraud if it is clear the title is given to hundreds, if not thousands, of employees who actually perform no functions that warrant an executive title. I worked at a Fortune 500 company with a total workforce ~10,000 of whom ~50% had the title of Vice President and another ~25% Assistant Vice President.

ImPostingOnHN 3y ago

What do we do when they all want to be CEO after that? It's just a reality that promotions are limited and not guaranteed, and that reality becomes harsher the higher one climbs. Also, many people don't want the leadership and organizational responsibilities that come with being promoted higher (less coding, more politics, less working by yourself, more working through others' hands, etc.)

philjohn 3y ago

Staff and above are fundamentally different jobs to Senior, which is why Senior is a terminal level at most companies. It's about scaling yourself through others, and not everyone wants to do that, and that's OK.

frewr 3y ago
It's not fundamentally different, and all engineers should be scaling their impact. Staff engineers who think like this tend to be the most useless engineers, since they eschew real work in favor of appearing politically powerful with lots of cross-team impact. Scaling impact is good, but real work often requires being deep in the trenches. The engineering ladder is one of the worst things to happen to this industry. Sometimes cross-team is the easy stuff, and solving some deep technical issue has the most impact. People here hate leetcode and IQ tests but they are far better filters than "job level" where I've seen many principal engineers failing to write basic code.
- Yoric 3y ago
  I'm a staff engineer. My work is quite different from what I did as a senior. I spend much more time investigating/solving organizational problems, attempting to make knowledge available cross-teams, extracting requirements from existing projects, proposing new projects, etc. When I'm not doing that, I'm working on deep technical issues, but I already did that as a senior/tech lead.

pjot 3y ago

> What are we going to do We’ll probably just pay them more.

frfl 3y ago

> cohort wants to get promoted into architects and managers in 10-20 years time? Architect is a different role than a dev, assuming dev means programmer/coder/software developer/software engineer. Manager is a completely different career path. No every dev wants to change their role into a non-dev. Some will, some will and will end up going back. > There just aren't enough senior jobs Well the job will change. New teams, products, companies will come and go. No one stays at one company anymore -- okay that may be an exaggeration but very rarely do you see one person working a single job in this industry for 20-30-40 years anymore.

baq 3y ago

Lots of people don't progress past senior... ever. They don't have to, don't feel like fighting for that promotion or just plain aren't good enough.

davidreisbr 3y ago

As with any scarce resource, the most effective people will get them. This piece is to help people be marginally more effective and be one of the ones that gets it. PS: your question assumes stable demand for software engineer, but I'm completely uncertain whether it will grow stay flat or disappear. It all will depend on how AI goes, as well and overall economic development and digitization of the economy.

Aurornis 3y ago

> The vast majority of devs are under 30. How do you arrive at this conclusion? “Under 30” but old enough to have graduated college leaves only ~8 years of career. Unless you think the majority of devs are retiring before the age of 45-50, this doesn’t make sense at all. I think you might be in a bubble with a lot of young devs, but it’s a big industry out there. Devs don’t just disappear or retire when we hit our 30s. They’re probably just at different companies.

Yoric 3y ago
Anecdotally, I've been one of the oldest developers in my companies since I started in the industry. I have no idea where old developers go, but it's starting to feel a bit lonely here.