8 ms·

Out of curiosity, what does "junior position" mean, exactly? Is it that you want to be more of an architect and were being offered programming positions? Or a

Out of curiosity, what does "junior position" mean, exactly? Is it that you want to be more of an architect and were being offered programming positions? Or am I just assuming programmer, and you're actually something else?

seiji 13y ago
There's junior in social standing and junior in official position. If you're told your boss manager will be a 23 year old who was BFFs with the founders all growing up, and you are 35 with 15 years of experience, that's kinda degrading. If you're a 30 year old with 10 years of experience and you're being offered less than what an undergrad gets entreating into facebook or apple or google ($30k sign on, $50k+ worth of 4-year options to start out with (which will easily be added to so you can cash out $500k to $1M within 6-8 years)), that's kinda degrading too. Sometimes your specific experience doesn't match the outside world anymore. Maybe you have eight years experience using Custom Designed Internal Framework that's of no use to the outside world. So, there you sit, being judged along side people with eight years less experience than you because all your experience is "hidden" to the new company, their interview process, and your social peers. There are many ways jobs and the interview process can make you feel less than stellar.
- kenrikm 13y ago
  If that 23 Year old is one of the first engineers and built much of the system then yes, you are going to be junior to them no way around that they most likely earned their spot working crazy hours when the company could barely be called one. There are two sides to every coin, if you want to avoid that then look to join really early companies and be the one that earns the spot by building the system.
- DavidWoof 13y ago
  Well, the OP seemed to have something specific in mind and I just was wondering what it is. Of your examples, the one with less money is just less money. I understand issues with a drop in salary, but the reference to "junior position" above seemed to imply more than salary. On the first, I've been older than my managers for years now. Who cares? I don't want to be a manager, I enjoy programming. I care deeply whether that 23-year-old is a good or bad manager, but that has nothing to do with how old she is.
  - ChristianMarks 13y ago
    Less money isn't always less money. I've taken less money for positions at what I thought were worthy organizations, and was rewarded by being treated like shit into the bargain.
    - michaelochurch 13y ago
      I've taken less money for positions at what I thought were worthy organizations, and was rewarded by being treated like shit into the bargain. If you're a professional, your rate is market or pro bono. Anything in-between just gets horrible. Your salary is what it costs the company for management to waste your time. If your salary's low, your time will be wasted.
      - ChristianMarks 13y ago
        A salary is paid in exchange for an employee's time, which implies that when management has employees sitting idle or otherwise misdirects their energies, the salary is what it costs to continue doing so. But I would not characterize a salary as the cost of wasting an employee's time--just the cost of their time. But you seem to suggest that ceteris paribus, a market salary is the minimum for which a similarly employed person would be indifferent to being kept idle. Perhaps this holds for a small interval dt. I lack the intuition that employee preference matters.
        seiji 13y ago
        wasting an employee's time In the sense of "meaning of life stuff" (fulfillment, meaning, purpose, etc). Your salary is what you charge someone to make you do things you wouldn't normally do. Sometimes, especially in "tech," jobs and natural interests align. In the normal world, that isn't always so.
taude 13y ago
Junior Position is a euphemism for "job that's not going to pay market rates". My experience in tech is that most true "junior" roles are covered by internships...
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  I think that getting a good junior engineer experience is rare and hard unless you start and land in the exact right place. If you attend Stanford or Harvard and your CS professor is a friend of someone VP-level in your company, then you'll still be "junior"-- at market-fair entry-level rates-- but you're going to be groomed to grow quickly and have a lot of freedom to travel the organization as you look for a fit that matches your talents and will enable you to rise quickly. If you're anyone else, your junior programmer years are every-person-for-him/herself and unless you fight hard (and job hop) you will get stuck doing the dreck that no one wants to do, that you don't learn from, and that shits all over your career. At Google, if you attended Stanford and landed in the Mt. View office (the office being more important than the school) there was, even when I was there, a decent chance of getting a legit SWE-2/SWE-3 experience that would train you to make more of yourself, and make promotions (up to Staff) basically ensured so you could focus your energy on actually learning and becoming a great engineer.
  - taude 13y ago
    Yeah, I agree with you. My career started at MSFT long ago and gained good experience quickly...so if you happen to land at a top tech company, you'll get the right experience. I think this goes for almost any high-end career, too. But as it is now, I see a lot of companies seeking Junior-level positions, but with big expectations and knowledge requirements. Everything except wanting to pay a proper salary.
michaelochurch 13y ago
Out of curiosity, what does "junior position" mean, exactly? I'm 30 with 7 years of experience. I wouldn't say I'm a top-1% programmer (probably top 5%, possibly 2%) yet but I'm a really good data scientist and I've seen a lot of different corporate environments. Also, being a Lisper (but also knowing well the virtue of static typing, having worked on production Ocaml systems) I have good taste. There are still some holes in my knowledge (I was a math major, not CS) but I'm filling them pretty quick. I wouldn't take a job where my day consists of being handed bugs or small features in some large project where the decisions were already made. Someone else can churn tickets, I'm past that point in my career. I'm not a prima donna. In the short term (say, two weeks) I'll do what is required no matter how unglamorous. But in the long term (3+ months) I'm not going to work in a role that's incoherent with my career objectives. I only work in roles where I get to make some of the technical decisions, because if I'm purely in an implementation role, I won't learn anything. I generate ideas and implement them; if I'm only doing the second of these, then the work is meaningless to me. If the project is big and complicated-- say, 2.1 to 2.3 in difficulty on this scale: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/the-trajectory-of-a-software-engineer-and-where-it-all-goes-wrong/-- http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/the-trajector... I'd probably be doing that under light supervision and that's fine, but if I'm not engaging in a learning process and in control of what I work on, then I'm wasting my time at this age. Is it that you want to be more of an architect and were being offered programming positions? Senior programming is different from junior programming. As with writing, there are varying forms of it and they have different flavors that might not be obvious to those who don't do it on a daily basis. A junior programmer fixes bugs and implements features that come downstream from executives, product management, and more senior programmers. There's a lot of value in that experience, if it comes with mentorship, when you're starting out. But when you get to my level, the quickest way to learn is to do things and find out directly what works and what doesn't. A senior programmer gets to set priorities, generally has a lot of autonomy over what he works on, and has input (and, often, final say) in product and architectural decisions. It's not about title, as it were. There are plenty of people with "Senior" in their title who are junior in terms of how they work, and there are others without fancy titles who are de facto senior.
- DavidWoof 13y ago

seiji 13y ago

There's junior in social standing and junior in official position. If you're told your boss manager will be a 23 year old who was BFFs with the founders all growing up, and you are 35 with 15 years of experience, that's kinda degrading. If you're a 30 year old with 10 years of experience and you're being offered less than what an undergrad gets entreating into facebook or apple or google ($30k sign on, $50k+ worth of 4-year options to start out with (which will easily be added to so you can cash out $500k to $1M within 6-8 years)), that's kinda degrading too. Sometimes your specific experience doesn't match the outside world anymore. Maybe you have eight years experience using Custom Designed Internal Framework that's of no use to the outside world. So, there you sit, being judged along side people with eight years less experience than you because all your experience is "hidden" to the new company, their interview process, and your social peers. There are many ways jobs and the interview process can make you feel less than stellar.

kenrikm 13y ago
If that 23 Year old is one of the first engineers and built much of the system then yes, you are going to be junior to them no way around that they most likely earned their spot working crazy hours when the company could barely be called one. There are two sides to every coin, if you want to avoid that then look to join really early companies and be the one that earns the spot by building the system.
DavidWoof 13y ago
Well, the OP seemed to have something specific in mind and I just was wondering what it is. Of your examples, the one with less money is just less money. I understand issues with a drop in salary, but the reference to "junior position" above seemed to imply more than salary. On the first, I've been older than my managers for years now. Who cares? I don't want to be a manager, I enjoy programming. I care deeply whether that 23-year-old is a good or bad manager, but that has nothing to do with how old she is.
- ChristianMarks 13y ago
  Less money isn't always less money. I've taken less money for positions at what I thought were worthy organizations, and was rewarded by being treated like shit into the bargain.
  - michaelochurch 13y ago
    I've taken less money for positions at what I thought were worthy organizations, and was rewarded by being treated like shit into the bargain. If you're a professional, your rate is market or pro bono. Anything in-between just gets horrible. Your salary is what it costs the company for management to waste your time. If your salary's low, your time will be wasted.
    - ChristianMarks 13y ago
      A salary is paid in exchange for an employee's time, which implies that when management has employees sitting idle or otherwise misdirects their energies, the salary is what it costs to continue doing so. But I would not characterize a salary as the cost of wasting an employee's time--just the cost of their time. But you seem to suggest that ceteris paribus, a market salary is the minimum for which a similarly employed person would be indifferent to being kept idle. Perhaps this holds for a small interval dt. I lack the intuition that employee preference matters.
      - seiji 13y ago
        wasting an employee's time In the sense of "meaning of life stuff" (fulfillment, meaning, purpose, etc). Your salary is what you charge someone to make you do things you wouldn't normally do. Sometimes, especially in "tech," jobs and natural interests align. In the normal world, that isn't always so.

taude 13y ago

Junior Position is a euphemism for "job that's not going to pay market rates". My experience in tech is that most true "junior" roles are covered by internships...

michaelochurch 13y ago
I think that getting a good junior engineer experience is rare and hard unless you start and land in the exact right place. If you attend Stanford or Harvard and your CS professor is a friend of someone VP-level in your company, then you'll still be "junior"-- at market-fair entry-level rates-- but you're going to be groomed to grow quickly and have a lot of freedom to travel the organization as you look for a fit that matches your talents and will enable you to rise quickly. If you're anyone else, your junior programmer years are every-person-for-him/herself and unless you fight hard (and job hop) you will get stuck doing the dreck that no one wants to do, that you don't learn from, and that shits all over your career. At Google, if you attended Stanford and landed in the Mt. View office (the office being more important than the school) there was, even when I was there, a decent chance of getting a legit SWE-2/SWE-3 experience that would train you to make more of yourself, and make promotions (up to Staff) basically ensured so you could focus your energy on actually learning and becoming a great engineer.
- taude 13y ago
  Yeah, I agree with you. My career started at MSFT long ago and gained good experience quickly...so if you happen to land at a top tech company, you'll get the right experience. I think this goes for almost any high-end career, too. But as it is now, I see a lot of companies seeking Junior-level positions, but with big expectations and knowledge requirements. Everything except wanting to pay a proper salary.

michaelochurch 13y ago

Out of curiosity, what does "junior position" mean, exactly? I'm 30 with 7 years of experience. I wouldn't say I'm a top-1% programmer (probably top 5%, possibly 2%) yet but I'm a really good data scientist and I've seen a lot of different corporate environments. Also, being a Lisper (but also knowing well the virtue of static typing, having worked on production Ocaml systems) I have good taste. There are still some holes in my knowledge (I was a math major, not CS) but I'm filling them pretty quick. I wouldn't take a job where my day consists of being handed bugs or small features in some large project where the decisions were already made. Someone else can churn tickets, I'm past that point in my career. I'm not a prima donna. In the short term (say, two weeks) I'll do what is required no matter how unglamorous. But in the long term (3+ months) I'm not going to work in a role that's incoherent with my career objectives. I only work in roles where I get to make some of the technical decisions, because if I'm purely in an implementation role, I won't learn anything. I generate ideas and implement them; if I'm only doing the second of these, then the work is meaningless to me. If the project is big and complicated-- say, 2.1 to 2.3 in difficulty on this scale: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/the-trajectory-of-a-software-engineer-and-where-it-all-goes-wrong/-- http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/the-trajector... I'd probably be doing that under light supervision and that's fine, but if I'm not engaging in a learning process and in control of what I work on, then I'm wasting my time at this age. Is it that you want to be more of an architect and were being offered programming positions? Senior programming is different from junior programming. As with writing, there are varying forms of it and they have different flavors that might not be obvious to those who don't do it on a daily basis. A junior programmer fixes bugs and implements features that come downstream from executives, product management, and more senior programmers. There's a lot of value in that experience, if it comes with mentorship, when you're starting out. But when you get to my level, the quickest way to learn is to do things and find out directly what works and what doesn't. A senior programmer gets to set priorities, generally has a lot of autonomy over what he works on, and has input (and, often, final say) in product and architectural decisions. It's not about title, as it were. There are plenty of people with "Senior" in their title who are junior in terms of how they work, and there are others without fancy titles who are de facto senior.

DavidWoof 13y ago