7 ms·

I cannot be alone in feeling that titles (within "tech" in particular) are almost completely arbitrary? What constitutes a "senior", "lead", "principal" and "st

by halper 7mo ago

I cannot be alone in feeling that titles (within "tech" in particular) are almost completely arbitrary? What constitutes a "senior", "lead", "principal" and "staff" X, respectively, has so much overlap that it really depends on the organisation. I myself have been called all of those things, but have honestly not been able to tell the difference: in some cases, I have had much more responsibility as a "senior backend developer" than a "staff engineer". I have recently interviewed for a number of roles with titles like CTO, engineering manager, tech lead etc and there is so much overlap that they seem to be one and the same. Have worked at companies on three continents, in organisations ranging from 6 people to 10k+, so have seen a few titles.

BillinghamJ 7mo ago
Main distinction I tend to see is just whether you're doing line management or not, which tends to be the EM track Beyond that, agree it seems like it can just be anything in virtually any title
qsort 7mo ago
Titles make no sense whatsoever, you're correct, but in nearly all organizations there's a split between IC track and manager track, so the argument the OP is making is debatable but it's not absurd on its face.
simonw 7mo ago
One thing that's worth remembering is that companies - especially in Silicon Valley - use titles as a way to compare salary levels with each other. If you are an engineering manager looking to make the case for raises for your team members one of the tools you have available is usually an anonymized survey of similar compensation levels from other companies. You can say things like "this person is a high performer and is being paid 85% of the expected level for this title at other companies nearby - we should bump them up". Your company may use job titles in a non-standard way, but there's probably an HR document somewhere that attempts to map them to more standard levels in order to make these kinds of comparisons useful. I don't know how this works in other industries or countries, but I've seen this pattern play out in San Francisco Bay Area tech companies.
- skeeter2020 7mo ago
  >> use titles as a way to compare salary levels with each other. small companies typically go the other way, using titles to make up for concrete remuneration. This is why everyone in a startup is a VP and ICs climb the ladder to senior in a couple of years.
  - jghn 7mo ago
    This brings back memories of the candidate who demanded coming in as a high level engineer. Their argument was they were currently a CTO. Of their 2 person company. While they were still in college. And they were only borderline hireable for our entry level role.
  - ryandrake 7mo ago
    > This is why everyone in a startup is a VP and ICs climb the ladder to senior in a couple of years. Another thing I've noticed happening is that if these companies grow into medium sized companies, these OG employees actually become VPs and directors whether they are qualified for these roles or not. Just by virtue of them being there first. I've worked at enough medium sized companies and have seen this at every one of them: "Why is this moron SVP of engineering?" "Well, he was employee number 5 back in the day."
yodsanklai 7mo ago
Within a given company, I think these roles are well-defined. In a big tech company, a principal engineer will influence decisions at a much higher level then a senior whose isn't visible outside his team. And an engineering manager support, evaluate, represent the team, and help with goal alignements.
- nixon_why69 7mo ago
  Maximally cynical take, tongue somewhat in cheek: If we measure principal engineers by "cross team force multiplier impact and its visibility to management" (second part being key), what kind of behaviors do we incentivize? Are there, possibly, bunches of mid-level and senior engineers dealing with extra hassles to demonstrate this impact?
  - jpgvm 7mo ago
    Sort of? My journey up from Senior/Staff was mostly on the back of proposing and then leading cross-functional projects. Which means I was doing Principal work before being granted the title. To be honest it was (and remains) a huge amount of work and I wouldn't continue doing it if the recognition and compensation hadn't been forthcoming in the following perf reviews. If you are doing this stuff and aren't moving up where you are then you should be going somewhere else as that is probably a very exploitive work relationship.
    - nixon_why69 7mo ago
      It sounds like you were one of the actual Principal Engineers, then. In my experience, there are some who had presumably done some of that in the past but now had to maintain their position by generating "cross-team impact" which was mostly just a PITA to actual practitioners. One case in particular, there was a re-org and the new org lacked principals but we had a common vision and a bunch of pieces in place. We needed a new vision that was led by the new principal, for obvious reasons. Whole thing was set back by a couple years while this was figured out. The existing, well-functioning pieces (with lots of users) were shipped to India teams for maintenance while the org slowly figured out facsimile pieces.
nyeah 7mo ago
Yeah. "You already know what a title is, Neo. A title is a text field attached to a pay grade."
hiAndrewQuinn 7mo ago
Your job title encompasses the highest-order bits about who you are, professionally. The value is much more between organizations than within a single one. If you plan to stay at one place for a long time, it's much less important. You have a chance to figure out how things 'really' work in practice. I know a guy who is a senior architect, and everyone refers to him as that at his company, but his actual on-paper title is something like "project technical lead". It's just not very important if you are going to stay there for 20 or 30 years and chase deep breathing metis. I don't have the same career outlook, so my job title is important to me. I actively negotiate for it. My own title is "senior DevSecOps engineer". Criticism of the acronym notwithstanding, this paints an instantly legible set of competencies around what I do best, what I do adequately, and what you probably would get better value for money paying someone else for. I'm probably pretty good at vulnerability management and securing CI/CD pipelines. Optimizing weights on our anti-spam logistic classifier is probably not the kind of thing I can do well. Etc., etc.
- chrisweekly 7mo ago
  metis?
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
- raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
  Titles mean even less across organizations. Any interviewer worth their salt is going to hire you and level you based on how they ascertain the level of scope , impact and dealing with ambiguity you dealt with. You can be a “CTO” of your little 5 person company - you might be leveled as an mid level software engineer at BigTech
gorbachev 7mo ago
My employer has no formal titles for engineers pretty much for this reason.
Muromec 7mo ago
>are almost completely arbitrary? What constitutes a "senior", "lead", "principal" and "staff" X, respectively, has so much overlap that it really depends on the organisation Titles at least useful to understand the hierarchy, but roles truly mean nothing. Sometimes the adult in the room is a PO, sometimes it's EM, sometimes they are responsible for the timelines and "project stuff", sometimes it's a Senior Engineer. In some places a QA is effectively doing PO stuff.
- cucumber3732842 7mo ago
  > In some places a QA is effectively doing PO stuff. Or your support team could wind up owning it without even knowing that they own it. Plan for who's gonna own the product because someone will, and that task will just settle somewhere random if you don't specifically assign it.
jghn 7mo ago
Outside of the FAANG style companies where how their levels map to each other are well known, titles are only useful to compare within the same company. You can't compare a specific title between two companies as they may not even have the same hierarchy much less requirements & expectations.
jrjeksjd8d 7mo ago
Titles for ICs matter for two reasons: comp, and perf reviews. At bigger companies the amount of RSUs for Staff versus Senior can be substantial. At a startup where equity is worth nothing and salaries are in a tight band anyways it doesn't make a difference. For perf reviews your title dictates the rubric you get evaluated against, but in fact your manager is probably trying to fit a curve and then work backwards to the rubric. So they'll decide you're a 3/4 and then pick some boxes for your weakest areas to mark you down in. The realpolitik of it is that you can do the same work or more at a lower level but get paid less, depending on what you negotiate coming in, your experience, previous roles, etc. Once you get into VP, Director, and C level they are comparable between orgs on their own kind of ladder. There's levels of responsibility for outcomes associated with being higher in the food chain. Not to say there also isn't a political aspect, but they are broadly comparable between bigger orgs.
- cj 7mo ago
  > At a startup where equity is worth nothing and salaries are in a tight band anyways it doesn't make a difference. It doesn't make a big difference to the company, but a lot of employees want these titles for ego / resume / status / recognition. And titles are free for startups to give away, so many do.
  - bombolo 7mo ago
    [dead]
- jghn 7mo ago
  They matter within a company for the reasons you cite. They mostly don't matter between companies however.
  - jjfoooo4 7mo ago
    Why do you think that? Senior, staff, principle levels are pretty standard across the industry, even if some companies call them different things
HumblyTossed 7mo ago
Personally, I don't give two shits about my title. If I could just be "computer programmer", I'd be happy. But the org likes titles and as long as I have to play that stupid game, I try to get titles.
Scarblac 7mo ago
Same for "programmer", "software developer", "software engineer", and so on. People insist that there's a real difference even when I have been all those things and there was no difference.
- 8note 7mo ago
  in canada theres a meaningful difference. Engineers are either EITs or have a professional stamp
  - bombolo 7mo ago
    [dead]
pkaler 7mo ago
As others have said, levels and titles are generally for compensation and performance reviews. Each company has their own bespoke ladder but it generally maps to: - L1: Intern with undergrad degree - L2: Intern with graduate degree - L3: Junior - L4: Intermediate - L5: Senior - L6: Staff - L7: Senior Staff - L8: Principal - L9: Distinguished - L10: Fellow Each company has their own numbers and names but it generally progresses like that. Impact and scope scales as you head up the ladder. L5 or Senior is usually considered a “terminal” role. That means all engineers should be able to get to this role. And people without the headroom get managed out if they can’t get to L5. Staff+ is usually “special”. It means that people count on you to drive initiatives and you have something special other than just writing code. You are able to make product and business impact. Distinguished and Fellow are very rare. Large FAANG companies will only have a handful of these engineers. It means you’ve made industry-wide impact like inventing map-reduce or DynamoDB or Kubernetes.
- madhadron 7mo ago
  You're describing a very small number of companies that all copied each other's systems. The idea of a terminal role, for example, is pure Facebook. These do not apply in general across the industry except where managers from those small number of companies came in and shoved them in before they were fired.
  - digitalPhonix 7mo ago
    Amazon had the concept of terminal role (SDE2, but I’ve heard it has changed) long before facebook existed.
  - sgillen 7mo ago
    In my experience a lot of tech companies, at least in the Bay Area, have all copied this system.
  - seangrogg 7mo ago
    In all fairness, a LOT of this was copied over from the military. From ranks to "High Year Tenure" (aka "Up or Out") nothing here is particularly innovative.
Balgair 7mo ago
Rant: I was a systems engineer for a while there. But not a pure S/W one. Like an actual engineer with nuts and bolts and pneumatics and amps and bolts and the like. That was the title at many many companies, it was a pretty rigid one too, despite the job function being quite jack of all trades. But then tech decided that they wanted to use Systems Engineer too. The reasons weren't bad, I guess. But then trying to find a job in my version of the role was near impossible on any job site. Unix this, Windows that. Sure, I used Unix systems for my job too, little servers for controlling some mechanical systems. Not like huge racks that served up billions of requests. And then I'd get the job spam too, as I matched some keyword threshold for the S/W type systems engineer. Always a entry level role through. Gah! Why couldn't S/W take the title of Unix Server Engineer, or Python Integration Engineer or something just a tad more specific and not bleeding all over my discipline? Okay, whew, rant over
- convolvatron 7mo ago
  this is not at all restricted to your case. try 'distributed system engineer' or even 'software engineer'. for the latter, one is an engineer of software, and the other is one that engineers with software. both perfectly valid jobs. it doesn't help that the interviews for the latter adopt the questions and expectations of the former, even though they are different jobs. its entirely possible to go through the software engineer hiring pipeline, and end up in a situation where the organization and the new employee have a fundamental disagreement about the slate of work. somehow in the giant waterfall of money, our ability to even talk meaningfully about our work to each other got lost
Aurornis 7mo ago
> that it really depends on the organisation. This is entirely it. Titles should be consistently ordered within an organization, but they are not portable from one organization to another. This is a lesson I’ve had to explain over and over to people at the beginning of their careers. I’ve been asked for advice about which offer to take from people thinking about leaving 10s of thousands of dollars on the table because another company will give them a Senior Engineer title and they think that’s important. When hiring, titles are basically ignored unless the person is coming from a company like Microsoft or Google where their leveling system is publicly known. I’ve interviewed so many “Prinicpal Staff Engineers” or even “CTO” people who would barely qualify as senior engineers at an average company. I’ve also interviewed “Senior Software Engineers” who had more experience than knowledge than anyone on our teams (and that’s saying a lot!) Hiring managers know this, but it’s not obvious if you haven’t done a lot of hiring or worked at a lot of different companies.
- Esophagus4 7mo ago
  100% This is complicated during acquisitions… you have a new company coming in and leveling them is hard because it’s a mass title migration exercise, and nobody wants to be down-titled. In the 2 examples I’ve seen gone wrong: -the people at the parent company look at the acquisition’s team and think, “there’s no way this idiot should be a director.” -the people at the startup think they’re geniuses because they got acquired but their tech is crap and they’re actually just 28 year olds running around without adult supervision -the startup guys will all leave once they vest or be pushed out for being lousy -the tech gets even more unstable because no one left knows how the code works
  - nradov 7mo ago
    In pretty much any software startup acquisition by a much larger company, even if they do technical due diligence up front they have to assume that all the code will need to be rewritten within a couple years. It's good to keep a few key technical resources around during the transition period but otherwise a high attrition level is acceptable.
- democracy 7mo ago
Zaheer 7mo ago
This is exactly why we built https://www.levels.fyi https://www.levels.fyi Too often people were getting down-leveled because they didn't know any better. The level comparisons we show on the homepage compare scope and responsibilities. People frequently think levels are based on compensation but compensation is the byproduct of it.
- sokoloff 7mo ago
  Firstly, I love levels and thanks for it. That said, in general for any given comp package, I’d want the lowest possible level I could take and get that package. That gives more upward runway.
bigwheels 7mo ago
It's an artifact of humans being obsessed with hierarchy and pecking order. Overall rather petty and boring.
re-thc 7mo ago
> titles (within "tech" in particular) are almost completely arbitrary It wasn't like that some years ago. Senior back in the days is probably your lead / staff of today. The problem isn't just the companies but people and their expectations. You have people crying about not being made "senior" for having 2 years of experience and the world is blown apart now. So is every company evil or broke or the social media culture these days expecting instant feedback etc? You used to work 10+ years as an engineer and just that and it was fine.
jackblemming 7mo ago
It’s how good you are at politics, that’s it. Big modifier if you’re tall and attractive.
jmkozko 7mo ago
At my organization you can't get a raise beyond inflation percentages unless you go up a title. It wouldn't surprise me if it's a way of gatekeeping salaries since years of employment typically outnumber the levels of title that are achievable in one's career.
gdubs 7mo ago
There's a wide variance, but there's been a lot of 'title inflation' over the past decade that has more to do, I think, with giving people incentives when they don't want to stretch the equity package any further.
ryoshu 7mo ago
Wait until you meet a VP in finance.
shmerl 7mo ago
Titles are arbitrary (as in people with different titles can do similar work), but compensation is tied to a title.
rm30 7mo ago
Titles are really a trap cannot reveal the real work, everything it's related to the size of company, type of organization and sector. A "top" position in a small company could be a mid one in a big tech but with a narrow field compared to the small one when sometimes you need to refill the coffee machine. At same time the flexibility of small one helps to solve problems of big ones.
abcde666777 7mo ago
I always think of the Gervais principle when it comes to titles - that they really just exist to provide illusory advancement and to get some of the minions to lord it over some of the other minions while the folks at the top of the organization benefit.
siva7 7mo ago
Titles are meaningless. Many tech ICs at top companies have more influence and responsibility as well as pay than managers at low tier companies.
Illniyar 7mo ago
Engineering titles at least have a few things that are nearly universally shared (such as actually needing to code, expecting to mentor). Product manager titles can have completely disjoint scopes of work between organizations - in one org they might be what was once systems designer role - getting requirements and writing specs, in another they might basically be doing UI or UX (even creating pages in figma), in others they are basically project managers.
mrbonner 7mo ago
I am also not surprised that many P.E. have become Political Engineer as opposed to Principal Engineer.
rvz 7mo ago
> I cannot be alone in feeling that titles (within "tech" in particular) are almost completely arbitrary? What constitutes a "senior", "lead", "principal" and "staff" X, respectively, has so much overlap that it really depends on the organisation. All the responses here won't admit that it is entirely made up, and designed to be built around a structured hierarchy which rule followers and obedient servents to the system to get closer to the $$$ printer. It takes a lot of back-stabbing, office politics, credit stealing and dishonesty to get to "the top", which is what the replies won't tell you. > I have recently interviewed for a number of roles with titles like CTO, engineering manager, tech lead etc and there is so much overlap that they seem to be one and the same. Have worked at companies on three continents, in organisations ranging from 6 people to 10k+, so have seen a few titles. Here is a case study, would you interview at Meta today and work under someone far younger than you and has a more 'senior" role than you? You do understand that the "title" was made up and "created" for a particular position? Heck, you could even build your own startup and give yourself that title if you wanted to. But the majority here will not and will work for companies like Meta under EMs that have no idea what they are doing. Therefore it is all made up. With some "staff", "leads" and "principals" are making it up as they go along and coasting as the low rankers hold the fort as the ship sinks.
- icedchai 7mo ago
  It's all about perception. People love fancy titles, even though it's ultimately meaningless. I worked with several "directors" that made much less than I did as a staff+ level engineer.
- 8note 7mo ago
  i think i could reasonably drscribe a difference. entry - needs mentoring to get stuff done mid - can build the whole thing by themselves, given enough time senior - can guide entry and mod to the same overall task and break up work such that both can do it. organizes and coordinates work across multiple teams principal/staff - sets direction for many teams worth of engineers above that stops being so meaningful, except for directing where major engineering directions go, and is kinda more of a sales job about getting a lot of engineering managers pointed in the same direction. a lead is orthogonal a bit, but reasonably a flavour of senior. you could have several seniors but only one lead in an area, who's a bit obsessed with a topic, and has the idea of where things are going. > Here is a case study, would you interview at Meta today and work under someone far younger than you and has a more 'senior" role than you? You do understand that the "title" was made up and "created" for a particular position? yes? i set up projects and gave feedback for people younger than me to get promos, and they did the work well and showed that they can do that work. Just cause didnt want the promo doesnt mean they didnt show their skill. Age is just a number. The youngest principal i met is by far still the best and most effective one (other than the sandbagging senior-principal)
hintymad 7mo ago
> I cannot be alone in feeling that titles (within "tech" in particular) are almost completely arbitrary? I remember that 10 years or so ago, an E5 in Google is considered a pretty prestigious position. In Amazon, L6 is such a high achievement that the entire India site had one L6 for more than 300 engineers. But somehow things started to change. Everyone expected herself to get promoted every couple of years. There was a joke in Amazon along the line of L8 is the new L7. My guess is that two factors came to play. One is that Meta (and then the Facebook) started to promote people really fast, so other companies followed. Also managers gradually treated promotion as a tool to retain the people they need. Once that's the incentive, a long title ladder becomes a natural choice.
foobarbecue 7mo ago
I just got a new job, hired as level 5 with official title Software Engineer (Mid-career) although my boss tells me I'm Chief Engineer. All the level 2 people on my team seem to be Senior Engineer or Lead Engineer.
jordiburgos 7mo ago
I went from Programmer to Staff, moved to Senior, jumped again to Lead, then only "Developer" promoted to Senior. Each company has its own way to name things.
Cthulhu_ 7mo ago
It really is arbitrary; I've never really been called senior or whatever, but apparently some people with 3-5 years of experience are already called that. It feels more like politics than a proper scale. Which is actually an issue in our industry, I think, and it's causing widely different expectations and skills in different companies. A "lead developer" for company A might be considered a medior at best at company B.

by halper 7mo ago

BillinghamJ 7mo ago

Main distinction I tend to see is just whether you're doing line management or not, which tends to be the EM track Beyond that, agree it seems like it can just be anything in virtually any title

qsort 7mo ago

Titles make no sense whatsoever, you're correct, but in nearly all organizations there's a split between IC track and manager track, so the argument the OP is making is debatable but it's not absurd on its face.

simonw 7mo ago

One thing that's worth remembering is that companies - especially in Silicon Valley - use titles as a way to compare salary levels with each other. If you are an engineering manager looking to make the case for raises for your team members one of the tools you have available is usually an anonymized survey of similar compensation levels from other companies. You can say things like "this person is a high performer and is being paid 85% of the expected level for this title at other companies nearby - we should bump them up". Your company may use job titles in a non-standard way, but there's probably an HR document somewhere that attempts to map them to more standard levels in order to make these kinds of comparisons useful. I don't know how this works in other industries or countries, but I've seen this pattern play out in San Francisco Bay Area tech companies.

skeeter2020 7mo ago
>> use titles as a way to compare salary levels with each other. small companies typically go the other way, using titles to make up for concrete remuneration. This is why everyone in a startup is a VP and ICs climb the ladder to senior in a couple of years.
- jghn 7mo ago
  This brings back memories of the candidate who demanded coming in as a high level engineer. Their argument was they were currently a CTO. Of their 2 person company. While they were still in college. And they were only borderline hireable for our entry level role.
- ryandrake 7mo ago
  > This is why everyone in a startup is a VP and ICs climb the ladder to senior in a couple of years. Another thing I've noticed happening is that if these companies grow into medium sized companies, these OG employees actually become VPs and directors whether they are qualified for these roles or not. Just by virtue of them being there first. I've worked at enough medium sized companies and have seen this at every one of them: "Why is this moron SVP of engineering?" "Well, he was employee number 5 back in the day."

yodsanklai 7mo ago

Within a given company, I think these roles are well-defined. In a big tech company, a principal engineer will influence decisions at a much higher level then a senior whose isn't visible outside his team. And an engineering manager support, evaluate, represent the team, and help with goal alignements.

nixon_why69 7mo ago
Maximally cynical take, tongue somewhat in cheek: If we measure principal engineers by "cross team force multiplier impact and its visibility to management" (second part being key), what kind of behaviors do we incentivize? Are there, possibly, bunches of mid-level and senior engineers dealing with extra hassles to demonstrate this impact?
- jpgvm 7mo ago
  Sort of? My journey up from Senior/Staff was mostly on the back of proposing and then leading cross-functional projects. Which means I was doing Principal work before being granted the title. To be honest it was (and remains) a huge amount of work and I wouldn't continue doing it if the recognition and compensation hadn't been forthcoming in the following perf reviews. If you are doing this stuff and aren't moving up where you are then you should be going somewhere else as that is probably a very exploitive work relationship.
  - nixon_why69 7mo ago
    It sounds like you were one of the actual Principal Engineers, then. In my experience, there are some who had presumably done some of that in the past but now had to maintain their position by generating "cross-team impact" which was mostly just a PITA to actual practitioners. One case in particular, there was a re-org and the new org lacked principals but we had a common vision and a bunch of pieces in place. We needed a new vision that was led by the new principal, for obvious reasons. Whole thing was set back by a couple years while this was figured out. The existing, well-functioning pieces (with lots of users) were shipped to India teams for maintenance while the org slowly figured out facsimile pieces.

nyeah 7mo ago

Yeah. "You already know what a title is, Neo. A title is a text field attached to a pay grade."

hiAndrewQuinn 7mo ago

Your job title encompasses the highest-order bits about who you are, professionally. The value is much more between organizations than within a single one. If you plan to stay at one place for a long time, it's much less important. You have a chance to figure out how things 'really' work in practice. I know a guy who is a senior architect, and everyone refers to him as that at his company, but his actual on-paper title is something like "project technical lead". It's just not very important if you are going to stay there for 20 or 30 years and chase deep breathing metis. I don't have the same career outlook, so my job title is important to me. I actively negotiate for it. My own title is "senior DevSecOps engineer". Criticism of the acronym notwithstanding, this paints an instantly legible set of competencies around what I do best, what I do adequately, and what you probably would get better value for money paying someone else for. I'm probably pretty good at vulnerability management and securing CI/CD pipelines. Optimizing weights on our anti-spam logistic classifier is probably not the kind of thing I can do well. Etc., etc.

chrisweekly 7mo ago
metis?
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
Titles mean even less across organizations. Any interviewer worth their salt is going to hire you and level you based on how they ascertain the level of scope , impact and dealing with ambiguity you dealt with. You can be a “CTO” of your little 5 person company - you might be leveled as an mid level software engineer at BigTech

gorbachev 7mo ago

My employer has no formal titles for engineers pretty much for this reason.

Muromec 7mo ago

>are almost completely arbitrary? What constitutes a "senior", "lead", "principal" and "staff" X, respectively, has so much overlap that it really depends on the organisation Titles at least useful to understand the hierarchy, but roles truly mean nothing. Sometimes the adult in the room is a PO, sometimes it's EM, sometimes they are responsible for the timelines and "project stuff", sometimes it's a Senior Engineer. In some places a QA is effectively doing PO stuff.

cucumber3732842 7mo ago
> In some places a QA is effectively doing PO stuff. Or your support team could wind up owning it without even knowing that they own it. Plan for who's gonna own the product because someone will, and that task will just settle somewhere random if you don't specifically assign it.

jghn 7mo ago

Outside of the FAANG style companies where how their levels map to each other are well known, titles are only useful to compare within the same company. You can't compare a specific title between two companies as they may not even have the same hierarchy much less requirements & expectations.

jrjeksjd8d 7mo ago

Titles for ICs matter for two reasons: comp, and perf reviews. At bigger companies the amount of RSUs for Staff versus Senior can be substantial. At a startup where equity is worth nothing and salaries are in a tight band anyways it doesn't make a difference. For perf reviews your title dictates the rubric you get evaluated against, but in fact your manager is probably trying to fit a curve and then work backwards to the rubric. So they'll decide you're a 3/4 and then pick some boxes for your weakest areas to mark you down in. The realpolitik of it is that you can do the same work or more at a lower level but get paid less, depending on what you negotiate coming in, your experience, previous roles, etc. Once you get into VP, Director, and C level they are comparable between orgs on their own kind of ladder. There's levels of responsibility for outcomes associated with being higher in the food chain. Not to say there also isn't a political aspect, but they are broadly comparable between bigger orgs.

cj 7mo ago
> At a startup where equity is worth nothing and salaries are in a tight band anyways it doesn't make a difference. It doesn't make a big difference to the company, but a lot of employees want these titles for ego / resume / status / recognition. And titles are free for startups to give away, so many do.
- bombolo 7mo ago
  [dead]
jghn 7mo ago
They matter within a company for the reasons you cite. They mostly don't matter between companies however.
- jjfoooo4 7mo ago
  Why do you think that? Senior, staff, principle levels are pretty standard across the industry, even if some companies call them different things

HumblyTossed 7mo ago

Personally, I don't give two shits about my title. If I could just be "computer programmer", I'd be happy. But the org likes titles and as long as I have to play that stupid game, I try to get titles.

Scarblac 7mo ago

Same for "programmer", "software developer", "software engineer", and so on. People insist that there's a real difference even when I have been all those things and there was no difference.

8note 7mo ago
in canada theres a meaningful difference. Engineers are either EITs or have a professional stamp
- bombolo 7mo ago
  [dead]

pkaler 7mo ago

As others have said, levels and titles are generally for compensation and performance reviews. Each company has their own bespoke ladder but it generally maps to: - L1: Intern with undergrad degree - L2: Intern with graduate degree - L3: Junior - L4: Intermediate - L5: Senior - L6: Staff - L7: Senior Staff - L8: Principal - L9: Distinguished - L10: Fellow Each company has their own numbers and names but it generally progresses like that. Impact and scope scales as you head up the ladder. L5 or Senior is usually considered a “terminal” role. That means all engineers should be able to get to this role. And people without the headroom get managed out if they can’t get to L5. Staff+ is usually “special”. It means that people count on you to drive initiatives and you have something special other than just writing code. You are able to make product and business impact. Distinguished and Fellow are very rare. Large FAANG companies will only have a handful of these engineers. It means you’ve made industry-wide impact like inventing map-reduce or DynamoDB or Kubernetes.

madhadron 7mo ago
You're describing a very small number of companies that all copied each other's systems. The idea of a terminal role, for example, is pure Facebook. These do not apply in general across the industry except where managers from those small number of companies came in and shoved them in before they were fired.
- digitalPhonix 7mo ago
  Amazon had the concept of terminal role (SDE2, but I’ve heard it has changed) long before facebook existed.
- sgillen 7mo ago
  In my experience a lot of tech companies, at least in the Bay Area, have all copied this system.
- seangrogg 7mo ago
  In all fairness, a LOT of this was copied over from the military. From ranks to "High Year Tenure" (aka "Up or Out") nothing here is particularly innovative.

Balgair 7mo ago

Rant: I was a systems engineer for a while there. But not a pure S/W one. Like an actual engineer with nuts and bolts and pneumatics and amps and bolts and the like. That was the title at many many companies, it was a pretty rigid one too, despite the job function being quite jack of all trades. But then tech decided that they wanted to use Systems Engineer too. The reasons weren't bad, I guess. But then trying to find a job in my version of the role was near impossible on any job site. Unix this, Windows that. Sure, I used Unix systems for my job too, little servers for controlling some mechanical systems. Not like huge racks that served up billions of requests. And then I'd get the job spam too, as I matched some keyword threshold for the S/W type systems engineer. Always a entry level role through. Gah! Why couldn't S/W take the title of Unix Server Engineer, or Python Integration Engineer or something just a tad more specific and not bleeding all over my discipline? Okay, whew, rant over

convolvatron 7mo ago
this is not at all restricted to your case. try 'distributed system engineer' or even 'software engineer'. for the latter, one is an engineer of software, and the other is one that engineers with software. both perfectly valid jobs. it doesn't help that the interviews for the latter adopt the questions and expectations of the former, even though they are different jobs. its entirely possible to go through the software engineer hiring pipeline, and end up in a situation where the organization and the new employee have a fundamental disagreement about the slate of work. somehow in the giant waterfall of money, our ability to even talk meaningfully about our work to each other got lost

Aurornis 7mo ago

> that it really depends on the organisation. This is entirely it. Titles should be consistently ordered within an organization, but they are not portable from one organization to another. This is a lesson I’ve had to explain over and over to people at the beginning of their careers. I’ve been asked for advice about which offer to take from people thinking about leaving 10s of thousands of dollars on the table because another company will give them a Senior Engineer title and they think that’s important. When hiring, titles are basically ignored unless the person is coming from a company like Microsoft or Google where their leveling system is publicly known. I’ve interviewed so many “Prinicpal Staff Engineers” or even “CTO” people who would barely qualify as senior engineers at an average company. I’ve also interviewed “Senior Software Engineers” who had more experience than knowledge than anyone on our teams (and that’s saying a lot!) Hiring managers know this, but it’s not obvious if you haven’t done a lot of hiring or worked at a lot of different companies.

Esophagus4 7mo ago
100% This is complicated during acquisitions… you have a new company coming in and leveling them is hard because it’s a mass title migration exercise, and nobody wants to be down-titled. In the 2 examples I’ve seen gone wrong: -the people at the parent company look at the acquisition’s team and think, “there’s no way this idiot should be a director.” -the people at the startup think they’re geniuses because they got acquired but their tech is crap and they’re actually just 28 year olds running around without adult supervision -the startup guys will all leave once they vest or be pushed out for being lousy -the tech gets even more unstable because no one left knows how the code works
- nradov 7mo ago
  In pretty much any software startup acquisition by a much larger company, even if they do technical due diligence up front they have to assume that all the code will need to be rewritten within a couple years. It's good to keep a few key technical resources around during the transition period but otherwise a high attrition level is acceptable.
democracy 7mo ago

Zaheer 7mo ago

This is exactly why we built https://www.levels.fyi https://www.levels.fyi Too often people were getting down-leveled because they didn't know any better. The level comparisons we show on the homepage compare scope and responsibilities. People frequently think levels are based on compensation but compensation is the byproduct of it.

sokoloff 7mo ago
Firstly, I love levels and thanks for it. That said, in general for any given comp package, I’d want the lowest possible level I could take and get that package. That gives more upward runway.

bigwheels 7mo ago

It's an artifact of humans being obsessed with hierarchy and pecking order. Overall rather petty and boring.

re-thc 7mo ago

> titles (within "tech" in particular) are almost completely arbitrary It wasn't like that some years ago. Senior back in the days is probably your lead / staff of today. The problem isn't just the companies but people and their expectations. You have people crying about not being made "senior" for having 2 years of experience and the world is blown apart now. So is every company evil or broke or the social media culture these days expecting instant feedback etc? You used to work 10+ years as an engineer and just that and it was fine.

jackblemming 7mo ago

It’s how good you are at politics, that’s it. Big modifier if you’re tall and attractive.

jmkozko 7mo ago

At my organization you can't get a raise beyond inflation percentages unless you go up a title. It wouldn't surprise me if it's a way of gatekeeping salaries since years of employment typically outnumber the levels of title that are achievable in one's career.

gdubs 7mo ago

There's a wide variance, but there's been a lot of 'title inflation' over the past decade that has more to do, I think, with giving people incentives when they don't want to stretch the equity package any further.

ryoshu 7mo ago

Wait until you meet a VP in finance.

shmerl 7mo ago

Titles are arbitrary (as in people with different titles can do similar work), but compensation is tied to a title.

rm30 7mo ago

Titles are really a trap cannot reveal the real work, everything it's related to the size of company, type of organization and sector. A "top" position in a small company could be a mid one in a big tech but with a narrow field compared to the small one when sometimes you need to refill the coffee machine. At same time the flexibility of small one helps to solve problems of big ones.

abcde666777 7mo ago

I always think of the Gervais principle when it comes to titles - that they really just exist to provide illusory advancement and to get some of the minions to lord it over some of the other minions while the folks at the top of the organization benefit.

siva7 7mo ago

Titles are meaningless. Many tech ICs at top companies have more influence and responsibility as well as pay than managers at low tier companies.

Illniyar 7mo ago

Engineering titles at least have a few things that are nearly universally shared (such as actually needing to code, expecting to mentor). Product manager titles can have completely disjoint scopes of work between organizations - in one org they might be what was once systems designer role - getting requirements and writing specs, in another they might basically be doing UI or UX (even creating pages in figma), in others they are basically project managers.

mrbonner 7mo ago

I am also not surprised that many P.E. have become Political Engineer as opposed to Principal Engineer.

rvz 7mo ago

> I cannot be alone in feeling that titles (within "tech" in particular) are almost completely arbitrary? What constitutes a "senior", "lead", "principal" and "staff" X, respectively, has so much overlap that it really depends on the organisation. All the responses here won't admit that it is entirely made up, and designed to be built around a structured hierarchy which rule followers and obedient servents to the system to get closer to the $$$ printer. It takes a lot of back-stabbing, office politics, credit stealing and dishonesty to get to "the top", which is what the replies won't tell you. > I have recently interviewed for a number of roles with titles like CTO, engineering manager, tech lead etc and there is so much overlap that they seem to be one and the same. Have worked at companies on three continents, in organisations ranging from 6 people to 10k+, so have seen a few titles. Here is a case study, would you interview at Meta today and work under someone far younger than you and has a more 'senior" role than you? You do understand that the "title" was made up and "created" for a particular position? Heck, you could even build your own startup and give yourself that title if you wanted to. But the majority here will not and will work for companies like Meta under EMs that have no idea what they are doing. Therefore it is all made up. With some "staff", "leads" and "principals" are making it up as they go along and coasting as the low rankers hold the fort as the ship sinks.

icedchai 7mo ago
It's all about perception. People love fancy titles, even though it's ultimately meaningless. I worked with several "directors" that made much less than I did as a staff+ level engineer.
8note 7mo ago
i think i could reasonably drscribe a difference. entry - needs mentoring to get stuff done mid - can build the whole thing by themselves, given enough time senior - can guide entry and mod to the same overall task and break up work such that both can do it. organizes and coordinates work across multiple teams principal/staff - sets direction for many teams worth of engineers above that stops being so meaningful, except for directing where major engineering directions go, and is kinda more of a sales job about getting a lot of engineering managers pointed in the same direction. a lead is orthogonal a bit, but reasonably a flavour of senior. you could have several seniors but only one lead in an area, who's a bit obsessed with a topic, and has the idea of where things are going. > Here is a case study, would you interview at Meta today and work under someone far younger than you and has a more 'senior" role than you? You do understand that the "title" was made up and "created" for a particular position? yes? i set up projects and gave feedback for people younger than me to get promos, and they did the work well and showed that they can do that work. Just cause didnt want the promo doesnt mean they didnt show their skill. Age is just a number. The youngest principal i met is by far still the best and most effective one (other than the sandbagging senior-principal)

hintymad 7mo ago

> I cannot be alone in feeling that titles (within "tech" in particular) are almost completely arbitrary? I remember that 10 years or so ago, an E5 in Google is considered a pretty prestigious position. In Amazon, L6 is such a high achievement that the entire India site had one L6 for more than 300 engineers. But somehow things started to change. Everyone expected herself to get promoted every couple of years. There was a joke in Amazon along the line of L8 is the new L7. My guess is that two factors came to play. One is that Meta (and then the Facebook) started to promote people really fast, so other companies followed. Also managers gradually treated promotion as a tool to retain the people they need. Once that's the incentive, a long title ladder becomes a natural choice.

foobarbecue 7mo ago

I just got a new job, hired as level 5 with official title Software Engineer (Mid-career) although my boss tells me I'm Chief Engineer. All the level 2 people on my team seem to be Senior Engineer or Lead Engineer.

jordiburgos 7mo ago

I went from Programmer to Staff, moved to Senior, jumped again to Lead, then only "Developer" promoted to Senior. Each company has its own way to name things.

Cthulhu_ 7mo ago

It really is arbitrary; I've never really been called senior or whatever, but apparently some people with 3-5 years of experience are already called that. It feels more like politics than a proper scale. Which is actually an issue in our industry, I think, and it's causing widely different expectations and skills in different companies. A "lead developer" for company A might be considered a medior at best at company B.