7 ms·

I hope one day we all can realise that all of the pontification about the defining qualities of a 'senior' engineer, or the height at which the bar should be se

I hope one day we all can realise that all of the pontification about the defining qualities of a 'senior' engineer, or the height at which the bar should be set, whether the bar has slowly been lowered over time, etc is all pointless. Senior or not senior is a lens useful only to HR and insecure engineers.

bravetraveler 2y ago
Agree. I've only recently received a title with proper seniority. People have been looking to me for leadership/guidance for longer. A 'sufficiently capable' junior can run the show for a bit. I've been them, for better or worse. I'm great at the technical side but admittedly terrible at the 'softer' people aspect. Multitudes, yo. Thanks to a lot of incident management experience, I'm the Dictator you want when the sky is falling. However, I'm absolutely best ignored when it comes to politics or making plans months out. My bias here is more apparent than normal, stability. Titles are made up, just like the rest. Trying to apply these too much is suspect
cess11 2y ago
Right, we should use the old apprentice, journeyman, master from the crafts. When a master says you're ready to independently take on customers and have what it takes to satisfy their needs you become a journeyman, and when you've practiced long enough to have pushed the boundaries of the craft and reliably do things that masters can learn from, then they might count you among themselves.
Simon_ORourke 2y ago
You'd be surprised at how it's a great developer of latent narcissistic behavior. I know a couple of solid developers who immediate turned into outright jerks on promotion to senior.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- bitwize 2y ago
  > I know a couple of solid developers who immediate turned into outright jerks on promotion to senior. I know a guy who became significantly more short-fused and less friendly when he was promoted into management. I don't think he liked management work, particularly when it involved both that and fulfilling outstanding responsibilities as an IC because he was the sole SME for a variety of different products/systems we had. There were many sad-sounding conversations with his then-girlfriend well after close of business. Point being, sometimes people who turn into jerks when promoted are not necessarily narcissists, they just have a shitton more work to deal with now and/or are out of their element and/or can't get home to spend enough time with their SO/kids/pets to fully psychologically reset at the end of the day. I don't know how that description tracks with the devs you knew, though.
  - bravetraveler 2y ago
    Yes, exactly! Thank you for posting. I tried to get at this in my [now-deleted] peer post... but failed to be nearly as effective. Was a shameful wall of text. Seniors are juniors with a label and expectations applied. It's incredibly subjective of course. To your point, I find the conventional expectations of 'Senior' too high. I have spent decades perfecting my technical skill. Literally since childhood. My personal skills have suffered, neither I or you want me to be a talking head. The story of the Junior who doesn't get enough help is a bit self-fulfilling/lacking in context. How much has been given/stuck/to who? Hearing 'not enough' can either raise someone to the challenge, or create resentment. A bit of closing irony. I was fine with providing on-site training as a Senior until RTO was ham-fisted so poorly... that I found an even more illustrious 'Principal' title, and expectations, elsewhere.
roenxi 2y ago
It links to a similar problem of measuring engineering productivity, which the industry cannot do. Notch wrote Minecraft when he was around 30. He didn't have 15 years experience in professional engineering and it seems to me he mostly just mucked around writing games in his professional life. He's now recognised as creating more than a billion dollars in value. Is a "senior" engineer doing better than that at creating software? Did he ever make senior? Does he exhibit all the traits of a senior engineer in the article like not having an ego? This is a profound challenge to the entire industry. The title really is just for HR, a developed ability to choose what projects should be worked on is much more important and there is a big gap between a Senior Software Engineer and someone who actually writes great software.
- locuscoeruleus 2y ago
  On the flip side, the code that he originally wrote would never scale to a billion dollars. It was wildly inefficient. Someone with a bit more experience as a game developer, someone a bit senior if you will, was necessary to turn the idea into what it is today.
  - zimpenfish 2y ago
    > It was wildly inefficient. Spoiler: Minecraft Java Edition is still wildly inefficient despite having a trillion dollar company backing it for 10 years.
    - gilleain 2y ago
      Wildly? I'm sure the code might be inefficient in many ways, but there have (as I understand) been performance improvements such as in chunk loading and map generation. Even the latest (apparently controversial) recent redstone update is meant to take account of performance - https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-snapshot-24w33a https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-snapshot-2... "The performance impact of Redstone wire (connected blocks of Redstone Dust) has been improved" I've no idea how true that statement is, of course!
fhd2 2y ago
When I ran bigger companies in the past, I gravitated towards defining whether someone is entry level, junior, mid level or senior _entirely_ based on experience measured in time. And their salary was a function in which that was the primary factor. The problem with any internal definition of "senior" is that it's misaligned with the market. If you pay someone less than their market value, they're likely to leave for a place that appreciates them more. If you pay someone above their market value, you're basically putting golden hand cuffs on them. I'm not saying I never did those things, but I did have almost exclusively bad experiences with both of these situations. And I've hired something like 200 developers in my CTO roles. If I have a senior whose salary I'm reluctant to raise, I wonder about three things: Do they actually have enough experience to be in that bracket? Is that person perhaps just not a good fit for what we need? Do I perhaps have too high expectations in seniors that made me inflate their salaries? If I have a junior whose salary I want to raise, I think about similar questions, but I also wonder if that person perhaps went above and beyond and a bonus is more fitting than a permanent raise. Sounds a bit cold and rigid, and of course there's exceptions to any rule, but this guiding principle has served me best over the years. Creating my own, literally made up and company specific, job description for a senior has pretty universally back fired. My company isn't a special snowflake that gets to invent their own job market. It's much more reasonable to connect to the actual job market. As for titles, I usually didn't put "junior" or "senior" in them at all as far as I could get away with it. For the most part, my seniors were fine, many even happy, with this.
- chiefalchemist 2y ago
  > Is that person perhaps just not a good fit for what we need? That's The Critical question. That is: the situation needs X (read: combo of hard tech skills and soft skills). Can they deliver X and then some? If not, there's three choices: 1) Develop them to fill their deficiencies, if they're interested. 2) Communicate with them that the biz has evolved and the fit is a misfit. This happens with founders who evolve into CEOs and don't have the chops for that role. It happens. 3) Do nothing. Note: A seasoned employee will always be asking the same questions. That is: is this the place for me. Should I stay or go? Great leaders and managers are aware of the mutualness of the relationship and approach it from that pov
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

bravetraveler 2y ago

Agree. I've only recently received a title with proper seniority. People have been looking to me for leadership/guidance for longer. A 'sufficiently capable' junior can run the show for a bit. I've been them, for better or worse. I'm great at the technical side but admittedly terrible at the 'softer' people aspect. Multitudes, yo. Thanks to a lot of incident management experience, I'm the Dictator you want when the sky is falling. However, I'm absolutely best ignored when it comes to politics or making plans months out. My bias here is more apparent than normal, stability. Titles are made up, just like the rest. Trying to apply these too much is suspect

cess11 2y ago

Right, we should use the old apprentice, journeyman, master from the crafts. When a master says you're ready to independently take on customers and have what it takes to satisfy their needs you become a journeyman, and when you've practiced long enough to have pushed the boundaries of the craft and reliably do things that masters can learn from, then they might count you among themselves.

Simon_ORourke 2y ago

You'd be surprised at how it's a great developer of latent narcissistic behavior. I know a couple of solid developers who immediate turned into outright jerks on promotion to senior.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bitwize 2y ago
> I know a couple of solid developers who immediate turned into outright jerks on promotion to senior. I know a guy who became significantly more short-fused and less friendly when he was promoted into management. I don't think he liked management work, particularly when it involved both that and fulfilling outstanding responsibilities as an IC because he was the sole SME for a variety of different products/systems we had. There were many sad-sounding conversations with his then-girlfriend well after close of business. Point being, sometimes people who turn into jerks when promoted are not necessarily narcissists, they just have a shitton more work to deal with now and/or are out of their element and/or can't get home to spend enough time with their SO/kids/pets to fully psychologically reset at the end of the day. I don't know how that description tracks with the devs you knew, though.
- bravetraveler 2y ago
  Yes, exactly! Thank you for posting. I tried to get at this in my [now-deleted] peer post... but failed to be nearly as effective. Was a shameful wall of text. Seniors are juniors with a label and expectations applied. It's incredibly subjective of course. To your point, I find the conventional expectations of 'Senior' too high. I have spent decades perfecting my technical skill. Literally since childhood. My personal skills have suffered, neither I or you want me to be a talking head. The story of the Junior who doesn't get enough help is a bit self-fulfilling/lacking in context. How much has been given/stuck/to who? Hearing 'not enough' can either raise someone to the challenge, or create resentment. A bit of closing irony. I was fine with providing on-site training as a Senior until RTO was ham-fisted so poorly... that I found an even more illustrious 'Principal' title, and expectations, elsewhere.

roenxi 2y ago

It links to a similar problem of measuring engineering productivity, which the industry cannot do. Notch wrote Minecraft when he was around 30. He didn't have 15 years experience in professional engineering and it seems to me he mostly just mucked around writing games in his professional life. He's now recognised as creating more than a billion dollars in value. Is a "senior" engineer doing better than that at creating software? Did he ever make senior? Does he exhibit all the traits of a senior engineer in the article like not having an ego? This is a profound challenge to the entire industry. The title really is just for HR, a developed ability to choose what projects should be worked on is much more important and there is a big gap between a Senior Software Engineer and someone who actually writes great software.

locuscoeruleus 2y ago
On the flip side, the code that he originally wrote would never scale to a billion dollars. It was wildly inefficient. Someone with a bit more experience as a game developer, someone a bit senior if you will, was necessary to turn the idea into what it is today.
- zimpenfish 2y ago
  > It was wildly inefficient. Spoiler: Minecraft Java Edition is still wildly inefficient despite having a trillion dollar company backing it for 10 years.
  - gilleain 2y ago
    Wildly? I'm sure the code might be inefficient in many ways, but there have (as I understand) been performance improvements such as in chunk loading and map generation. Even the latest (apparently controversial) recent redstone update is meant to take account of performance - https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-snapshot-24w33a https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-snapshot-2... "The performance impact of Redstone wire (connected blocks of Redstone Dust) has been improved" I've no idea how true that statement is, of course!

fhd2 2y ago

When I ran bigger companies in the past, I gravitated towards defining whether someone is entry level, junior, mid level or senior _entirely_ based on experience measured in time. And their salary was a function in which that was the primary factor. The problem with any internal definition of "senior" is that it's misaligned with the market. If you pay someone less than their market value, they're likely to leave for a place that appreciates them more. If you pay someone above their market value, you're basically putting golden hand cuffs on them. I'm not saying I never did those things, but I did have almost exclusively bad experiences with both of these situations. And I've hired something like 200 developers in my CTO roles. If I have a senior whose salary I'm reluctant to raise, I wonder about three things: Do they actually have enough experience to be in that bracket? Is that person perhaps just not a good fit for what we need? Do I perhaps have too high expectations in seniors that made me inflate their salaries? If I have a junior whose salary I want to raise, I think about similar questions, but I also wonder if that person perhaps went above and beyond and a bonus is more fitting than a permanent raise. Sounds a bit cold and rigid, and of course there's exceptions to any rule, but this guiding principle has served me best over the years. Creating my own, literally made up and company specific, job description for a senior has pretty universally back fired. My company isn't a special snowflake that gets to invent their own job market. It's much more reasonable to connect to the actual job market. As for titles, I usually didn't put "junior" or "senior" in them at all as far as I could get away with it. For the most part, my seniors were fine, many even happy, with this.

chiefalchemist 2y ago
> Is that person perhaps just not a good fit for what we need? That's The Critical question. That is: the situation needs X (read: combo of hard tech skills and soft skills). Can they deliver X and then some? If not, there's three choices: 1) Develop them to fill their deficiencies, if they're interested. 2) Communicate with them that the biz has evolved and the fit is a misfit. This happens with founders who evolve into CEOs and don't have the chops for that role. It happens. 3) Do nothing. Note: A seasoned employee will always be asking the same questions. That is: is this the place for me. Should I stay or go? Great leaders and managers are aware of the mutualness of the relationship and approach it from that pov

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]