There is no standard whatsoever for the adjective "Senior" when applied to engineers:
Sometimes it means, "Able to work without someone looking over their shoulder at all times."
Sometimes it means, "Able to lead and mentor others."
And sometimes it means, "Has organizational skills above and beyond engineering skills, able to lead cross-team initiatives and deal with all the human/organization issues around the engineering."
The latter definition is the most interesting to me, it describes what "Staff" and "Principal" engineers do in most orgs. But if I had to pick a line to draw, I'd say that while a Staff or Principal spends most or all of their time working on projects that involve the human/organization issues around the engineering, a senior engineer is one who does this at least part of the time.
There are other, perfectly valid perspectives on what makes an engineer "senior," but what I like about this one that's relevant to TFA is that this kind of "seniority" is hard to fake.
On a related note, I dated a woman who was promoted to vice president of a small start up when she was in her 20's. She had to hide her title on her resume when she left because no established firm wanted to hire someone whom they assumed they'd need to pay a quarter million dollars to be competitive.
This is hilarious because I recently had a junior dev come to me to discuss issues they were having with their (incompetent) software manager.
She said "I don't understand why he doesn't understand the technical aspects. It must be me...I must be bad at communicating because [the manager] was a CTO at a startup!"
I literally laughed out loud. Her communication skills were fantastic, but she was so new and naive to think that titles from a startup have literally any worth.
Haha. “CTO in small startup” can easily mean 3 friends got together and tried to make an app in moms basement, while giving each other fancy roles.
Never look at titles alone. Their scope vary wildly across companies. Even in big corporations they can be used by friends patting each other on the back or to make employees feel important as an alternative to giving an actual raise.
I understand the problem of ridiculously inflated titles (like “VP Alliance and Strategic Partnerships World…” for the first employee doing sales) but on the other hand I don’t really see an alternative for CEO and CTO, what would be more appropriate titles for co founders for small startups?
While it might have been a young CTO at a small startup, the field of technology is vast, it's not the job of the CTO to understand all aspects of it.
Similarly, when I started in Engineering, I didn't understand quite how much complexity existed in all the other areas of running a company, I've since learned much about them and have much more respect for CEO's who have to manage all of those issues.
> Sometimes grandiose titles can work against you.
Early stage startups can be especially hilarious that way, especially when young founders/early stage employees mistakenly feel they need a "big" title to be taken seriously...
Yep, indeed. I'm technically the CTO of the startup I'm helping to found. And even though I'm 37, I haven't been in tech long enough to feel like I've earned that title, so my LinkedIn says Chief Software Architect (I made it up).
"It's interesting, these titles," Musk said. "You know that there's actually only three titles that actually mean anything for a corporation? It's president, secretary, and treasurer. And technically they can be the same person. And all these other titles are just basically made up. So CEO is a made-up title, CFO is a made-up title. General counsel, a made-up title. They don't mean anything."
What Musk is saying is that from a legal perspective, there are only three job titles/roles that must be filled in a corporation. Beyond that, they could literally have titles like "Grand Chief Space Wizard" and "Cheesy Toast" for various jobs and roles. They could call the role of General Counsel "Asshole in a Suit."
I think this quote is actually about a different point. The President, Secretary and Treasurer don't need any actual credentials for their role like a council needs a JD, but they have specific responsibility/liability in corporate legal structures.
The man is plainly over-reaching here, though perhaps it's an expression meant to bolster his public persona, and not an actual representation of his knowledge.
General counsel (at least in the Anglo-American context) means the senior legal advisor to an organization. As attorneys, they are required by law to have admission to the bar of the relevant jurisdiction, and to observe certain ethical standards and practices. This is not a made-up title and if it is that means there's a lawsuit for unauthorized practice of law that hasn't been filed yet.
Nope. I don’t know that you necessarily even need to have passed the bar exam in a given jurisdiction, much less have any kind of actual degree.
IMO, you’d be stupid to take a job like that if you didn’t have the degree and have passed one or more bar exams in the appropriate related jurisdiction(s), but I don’t know that it’s actually required.
You'd need to be licensed to perform the various legal duties one expects of general counsel, but general counsel is not a protected title and thus anyone within the company could be given the title. Musk is right on this one.
Love it. Yeah I find myself mentoring junior engineers, writing code myself, reading documentation on tech I've never worked with before, designing email templates, writing marketing copy, crafting business plans, calculating sweat equity, etc etc. So at the end of the day...tf do titles mean
The funny thing is that I might assume a CEO/CTO at a small startup has less experience than a "Chief Software Architect." My assumption would be that the executives are founders and that there's not a minimum experience requirement for founders.
If you take the stereotypical Silicon Valley style start of 2-4 founders in their 20s or early 30s, someone is gonna be CTO, and there's a good chance they'll have relatively little experience. But a Chief Architect, I'd assume was an experienced early hire rather than a founder.
How long have you been in tech? I'm 41 and have been in tech since I was 17 :) I've been calling myself an Architect but after working with some experienced CTOs.. lets say I now know my value/position. If I ever work for someone else then that's the minimum position I'd take.
I was one of the technical guys on a Danish standardization project called OIO - Offentlig Information Online (offentlig means governmental in this case) - at one time they decided that we needed 'titles', so I and one other guy decided we would call ourselves XML Architects as a piss-take on another part of the project. Got the business cards and everything, but ADHD me lost mine.
When I worked for a bank it was explained to me that early on foreign banks and financial institutions would not take a call from someone other than a VP, so they made all the bankers VP's to get work done. That was probably an over simplification.
Thing is, within the banking industry, these end up being fairly standardized titles. Titles mean less across industries, but within an industry, there's some consistency. In fact in banking, these are more standardized than tech industry titles are.
Typically at banks, the ranks are: analyst, associate, VP, managing director. Everyone eventually gets to VP, so it's not a particularly high level. It's similar to how tech companies have a level everyone is supposed to reach (often "Senior"). So, analyst is an entry-level role, associate is a mid-level role (2yrs experience, or a higher degree), and VP is a terminal role. VP is a wide band, though, so there's often sub-levels within that (whether publicly visible or not): managing director is a very high title at a bank.
I think this is mostly a technical requirement related to signing authority (e.g. for lots of things you need to be an officer).
Of course, the VP being the threshold target role for this is a choice, but it seems to be useful in contexts like banks to have some sort of dividing line.
In banks in engineering it was once explained to me, that dev salaries require a title (in comparison with other staff). Hence ordinary developers are often titled AVP, VP or AD.
My cofounder and I just used “Design Lead” and “Dev Lead” as our titles for nearly a decade - I only reluctantly took the mantle of “CTO” after taking outside investment, as they insisted on grandiosity - said it was amateurish to have small titles whilst employing 50+ people.
oh yeah, this is super true of sales. everyone in your sales org needs absurd titles or nobody will ever speak to them. Just one of those things apparently.
At my current startup, I recommended everyone to hold the title of Research Engineer. I was to be recruited as a Software architect / Principal tech lead, but I chose to keep this title too & suggested the same to my peer & immediate junior. Something good that I learned from Facebook Engineering flat organization structure.
Keeping the hierarchy flatter helped more honest communication. There were lesser inhibitions to talk & express opinion. In any disagreement, experience seniority played the subtle hand to navigate discussion.
This is so very important, as titles can often inhibit information flow.
The only problem with this approach is that people look for other markers of "status" (like, for instance, the amount of time you've been with a company.
Having just taken a job as a l Lead SRE in a large consultancy despite not being skilled or experienced enough I'm terrified that I'll struggle to move to a new org solely because of my job title. It's jarring how much of an impact it has made on me and I don't really know what to do about it.
I'm aware that it's only really a problem when I move but I don't think the work and tech I'll be exposed to will help me reach a level where I'll be confident.
Just rephrase the job title on your resume so it's faithful to reality but not the literal title.
At my last job, my formal title was "Systems Integration Engineer", which has a real industry definition as recognized by various engineering fellowships. Since I did very little formal Systems Integration at the job, I labelled myself as a "Cargo Logistics Engineer" on my resume. It worked fine.
> had to hide her title on her resume when she left because no established firm wanted to hire someone whom they assumed they'd need to pay a quarter million dollars to be competitive
That's bizarre given Wall Street has been abusing the Vice President title for generations now. (VPs at American banks report to Managing Directors, a middle-management level of which there are hundreds if not thousands. It's the tier above Associate, i.e. straight out of B school or with a year or two of Analyst experience.)
The European equivalent is "Executive Director". (That is, someone at Goldman who was promoted to VP from Associate in the US would have been promoted to ED in Europe.) That's even worse title abuse, if you ask me.
My sole stint as a VP was in a thirteen-person startup. I had that title for pseudo-legal reasons, we needed a VP.
My later role as Director of a 50-person engineering group in a 200-person startup was way more relevant in terms of my experience managing development.
I've struggled with that, having been in the same position - I was a "VP" at a six-person startup over ten years ago. Of course, I didn't anything remotely VP-ish there - I was programming computers, same as I've ever done. But, that was my title. So... do I write that on my resume and be honest about my title or write a title that's honest about what I was actually doing?
IMO it's always fine to be creative when listing a past job title, PROVIDED you are trying to provide more accurate information and not deceive. I've had titles that do not at all accurately reflect my day to day, so I list them as something more topical. However I will never portray myself as having more authority nor more day-to-day experience than my title would have otherwise conveyed.
Yes, I never use my official title in the company emails. There were some funny moments in the past when some people thought someone reporting to me was my boss, but it was always funny. These days people in my team have more impressive titles than me, I am totally fine with that.
> She had to hide her title on her resume when she left
An easy fix for that would be to add the number of employees she managed and the size of the company. The title is scary but she did manage people and did report to the CEO, so to me it is a VP position. Of course, that won’t map 1:1 when hiring into a new company (doubt she’ll be reporting to the CEO) but the person she might report to would be managing an org of a similar size to her previous company.
> because no established firm wanted to hire someone whom they assumed they'd need to pay a quarter million dollars to be competitive.
250k total comp (including some equity) doesn’t sound outlandish to me. Very much in the market for someone who had lead experience in her 20’s. Some fresh grads land that out of school.
If you graduate from any top 10 school in the US — which plenty of people do — it is indeed a pretty typical offer
Love how I’m downvoted for pointing out a fact. I mean, for fuck’s sake, look at levels.fyi. And look at how many people FAANG and FAANG-adjacent startups hire every year. It’s really not that rare. But hey, stay in denial.
Yeah but this is less than 1/10 of 1% of the number of people that graduate every year. By the same logic you could say that everyone has trust funds, because most of the people in this small slice have them. Just because something applies to the top 0.1% of the US doesn't mean it applies to the rest of the 99.9%. This is the problem with wealth and opportunity disparity in this country. The haves think that the have nots are in that position due to choice. It's not a choice to be born into poverty.
Georgia Tech is consistently ranked a Top 10 CS program (worldwide) and their OMSCS program now accounts for 10% of all MSCS degrees issued. It costs about 6,000 to 7,000 USD total:
"OMSCS started in January 2014 with 380 students. Enrollment increased each semester (excluding summer terms). In 2019 I believed that we were very close to the peak, since we are graduating more and more students. But then, the pandemic hit and we have kept growing every semester. This spring term we just passed a new mile stone – we have over 12,000 students, 12,016 to be precise. We might be at the peak or very close to it. Apparently, OMSCS is the biggest degree program, online or not in any subject in the US and probably the world. More importantly, the degree is of the same quality of the on campus program. We have 56 courses (we started with 5); several courses now have over 1,000 students. We graduated 1,970 in 2021 for a total of 6,470 so far. We are graduating in a year well over 10% of the number of those that graduate with MS in CS in the US." - Zvi Galil
Looks great on paper but the people you really need to reach don't have undergrad done. Is this one of those rare masters one can complete with no undergrad done?
It’s not a choice to apply yourself and get into a good school? I mean seriously, given how hot the US software market is, there’s no excuse.
And FWIW, I come from a poor immigrant background. My family was on welfare. I got free lunch at school. The American dream come true. Sorry that not everyone can hack it in life.
Exactly my point, folks with privilege like yourself don't even understand what privilege they have and have taken advantage of their whole life.
I did (apply myself). I did work my ass off to get into, and out of, (good) engineering school and pay for it also.
It simply wasn't an option for me to go to an expensive private or out of state school with a price tag of a couple hundred thousand dollars. So I went to the best school I could afford. Many folks are in this boat. It's not for a lack of trying or intelligence - it's for a lack of privilege.
Edit - I also want to acknowledge that compared to many folks in the world I am very privileged. It only serves to highlight my point even further. These statements are less about me personally and more about me recognizing that I, and many others in our HN world are very privileged in one way or another as compared to he average American, or Human.
Please stop using that word. It sucks the life from you because you think it excuses you from self analyzing why you aren't happy where you are. Life is not fair if you are a human, cat, squirrel or mouse. We are born into a specific set of conditions...look around and move but please stop using the word privilege. Everyone and everything is different.
I am very happy where I am. Within myself, I am not blaming anything for lack of anything but rather celebrate my successes and what has come from my hard work.
That doesn't mean I can't recognize that folks are different, and that where we start out most definitely has an impact on how far we go.
I actually agree with this, if only because of the political connotations the term “privilege” has acquired.
I think a better term would be “advantages”. It adequately describes the meaning that’s being conveyed without carrying the implication that it’s necessarily completely outside of the individual’s control.
Just what is it with extra privileged people and being allergic to admitting it.
You seriously, honestly, from the bottom of your heart, think that 90% of the 70k people living in the Complexo do Alemão are just lazy and don't fix their lives due to sloth?
Before you start, I'm happy with my life and my circumstances.
I went to a public in-state school with poor parents. Full need-based financial aid in school. I made 6 figures out of school and currently make the big numbers you claim are impossibly rare.
You claim that not everyone is intelligent enough to make it into these schools in another post but we know from science that even just changing the way you study can improve performance by half a standard deviation [1]. So maybe you just didn't work as hard as the competition? Maybe you didn't look at all the aspects of _how_ you work and do some self-reflection about working more efficiently?
Don't blame intelligence when your own decisions have much more impact on overall performance than 10-20 points of IQ do. Why do you think Asians comprise 50% of school populations where affirmative action is banned? Hint: it's not because of superior intelligence, but work ethic.
Nonsense, you were privileged to be the right kind of "poor", the kind of poor that the system caters to. Just because the system gave you a big hand up does not imply that it does for everyone in equal conditions. You were privileged and you don't even realize it.
There are many poor people that are never given that opportunity regardless of ability. To those people, you had an easy path.
>>> So I went to the best school I could afford. Many folks are in this boat. It's not for a lack of trying or intelligence - it's for a lack of privilege.
and
> But you had the privilege [o]f uncommon intelligence and test taking ability. Not all privilege is money.
Not really. It's not so black and white. My point is that above a certain threshold of GPA/test scores/"intelligence" college is free. If you are below that threshold college is not. For those of us that were below that threshold, for whatever reason, we had to figure out how to pay for it. Within that bucket there are people who's family can just pay for it, no matter how expensive (these are the people going to Harvard and Wharton out of pocket), and there are those who simply can't afford to pay 200k for an education because they don't have it. Those folks then choose state Schools (which I went to and are wonderful). My point is that the average graduate of Wharton has a much higher average starting salary than the average state school. Therefore tying a family's ability to pay more tuition with a graduates average salary being higher.
It's simply the way the world works. The rich get richer.
So just to be clear, you're repudiating your statement that when people can't afford to attend college, that's not for lack of intelligence on their part?
Sorry, where did the "reduction" occur in rephrasing "above a certain intelligence, college is free" to "if you can't afford college, you're missing some intelligence"?
The one is just the logical contrapositive of the other.
Those aren't the same thing, that's where the reduction occurred.
My statement, which is the simple reality of the world, was that top performing students who are able to prove so via grades, test scores and other admissions requirements and scholarship requirements, are able to have top tier educations paid for via scholarships and similar aid. For folks, like me, who weren't in that bucket, have a different set of opportunities and tradeoffs. Those include paying for a 200k "top tier" education if our situation affords it, or the choice I and many others make which is to go to the best state school (or other "affordable") option.
I'm not complaining, it's just how the world works. If you were to create a flow chart for college that covers any input (student), this is what it would look like.
Reducing the above to "college is free above a certain intelligence" is missing the point and focusing on a needless obsurd detail.
Ah yes, after all a lottery winner will advise everyone around them to play lottery - clearly it works, they are the best example.
Once again, you are refusing to acknowledge that the word "typical" is not appropriate here. Even in your example it's not typical for American people to achieve that American dream, as America is absolutely awful on the social mobility scale.
Edit: also it's really classy you are just deleting your replies to my comments instead of actually engaging in a discussion. Your choice I suppose.
Oh I know I have it good. 1% in terms of income. And I come from a really unprivileged background. Uneducated parents, family on welfare. Shit man, we were so poor, I got into college for free based on needs.
Were your parents - I'm quoting you here - "dumb and lazy"? Since they didn't pull themselves bup by the bootstraps like you did, and yet they allegedly had the same opportunities as you.
They did actually, work their way up from where they started. And eventually got to immigrate to America, where opportunities are much better and their kids could thrive. It’s the stereotypical thing where immigrants to this country are much more hardworking and appreciative of the opportunities they have here compared to their home country, versus the native population who doesn’t appreciate just how good they have it in America. I wouldn’t be surprised if my kids turn out that way — it’s just how it is.
I like how the person above can also say the following.
> Why is it nonsense? The wealthy and connected can already give their progeny undue access to opportunities via their social networks, and can afford the best education that money can buy. That's already way more of an advantage than the average citizen gets.
Besides, the whole point is to maximize equality of opportunity.
For computers, not everyone can afford computers in America. I was lucky to find a job walking fields as a child to afford one but that opportunity doesn't exist for everyone.
Spoiler - it's because it's seen by kids. If a kid in Jamaica wants to be a runner it's obvious to them what to do. Its being told to them every day in their sports entertainment, local events, advertising, etc. It a kid in Jamaica wants to be a CS person, they have no clue what to do. No TV ads, local clubs, events, races, all grooming them day by day to he a better programmer. We have that in the US, in the Bay area, etc. We are grooming young STEM folks from the beginning.
The book « The Sports Gene » discusses that the West African heritage of Jamacians actually gives them a genetic advantage. I forget the details but basically, to resist malaria they have sickle cell anemia which leads to powerful anaerobic systems ideal for sprinting.
You could put someone of different genetic stock in the same culture bit they wouldn’t be as successful at sprinting.
>>If you graduate from any top 10 school in the US — which plenty of people do
Yes, and globally that's still nothing. You are talking about the elite of the elite, chosen ones among the chosen ones. In other 1st world countries, and even in majority of USA no, recent graduates are not paid quarter of a million dollars. There's a select, very exclusive, very limited group of people who do. But like others have pointed out already - that's not "typical" by any definition of the word.
I wasn't aware that "elite of the elite" included many public schools that aren't even that difficult to get into. If you're a California resident UCSD, UCI, UCB, UCLA, UCSB are all accessible schools that give you a very solid shot at a FAANG job out of college. If you're a Michigan resident, same goes for UMich. Illinois, UIUC. Georgia, Georgia Tech. Texas, any number of great state schools. These schools are not that difficult to get into. They're also public, so there is no legacy shenanigans happening to boost wealthy applicants.
If you grew up in a shitty high school, you can go to a community college and then transfer to one of these state schools. I know for certain California has excellent policies that favor CC applicants transferring in. There are multiple ways in the door if you apply yourself.
Perhaps consider that a student that can't even get into a state school has no business or ability to write code at a level that would merit a 250k salary. The bar is on the floor.
That was literally me. Went to community college and, as you say, had a much easier time transferring to a UC. I wasn’t even among the smartest graduates in my program — not by a long shot. And yet, opportunities abound.
Like I said, the software engineering job market is red hot right now. I rejected a few offers and they still asked me a few months later if I would be interested in joining. That’s how desperate they are for anyone with even a reasonable amount of talent.
Which again supports the idea that it's about applying yourself and not about privilege or any other excuse that people use to justify their own shortcomings.
Exactly. Even if we take MIT which seems to graduate AT MOST 10,000 students each year -- times 10 (10x)-- it's only 100,000 graduates. The 1 million comes from where?
But we are specifically talking about graduates being paid quarter of a million dollars, so why are you bringing absolute numbers into the mix? Should I compare it against the absolute number of people working everywhere in the world? Because then that million won't be so large suddenly.
If you want to do this properly tell me how many graduates out of all graduates per year get paid quarter of a million dollars when they start. Because it will be such an insignificant number that again - using the word "typical" to describe it will be just delusional.
The Median Income in King County, where you work, is 90k / year. That's absurdly high in this country; but it's still less than HALF what you make. Check yourself.
When a large part of the compensation is stock, it's worth remembering that share prices can go down too.
Meta/FB is down 35% since September. Many public mid-cap software unicorns are down 50%. Smaller companies that IPO'd last year are often down even more than that.
If you joined one of these companies last fall and got a $150k base salary + $400k stock grant that vests over four years, your total compensation was $250k when hired, but is now down to $200k after the stock has lost 50%. Of course the stock price may go up again. (But it also may not, as anyone who lived through 1999-2001 remembers.)
Good point. I mean “typical” as in, entirely expected within a nontrivial portion of the population. Where absolutely nobody would be surprised that you’re making this much.
Is it typical for the general population to make a million a year? No, but it is entirely typical for investment bankers and quants at hedge funds. To say that is atypical of the average worker in America — well, of course, but that isn’t a very meaningful statement when you’re specifically discussing people in investment firms. And that’s what this article is about — the subset of the population for which this is entirely normal and expected.
You realize rarity is referencing the relative percentage of an event or item and not the absolute number right? If you have 1 million people in the numerator, but 100 million in the denominator, then the rate is pretty rare
Those salaries are only possible, because most of it is stock compensation, highly inflated due to the biggest stock market bubble of the last 30 years.
As of next week, as soon as the Fed starts raising rates, the stock market will crater. These compensation values will then become what companies are really willing to pay. Not much different from other parts of the world.
If you factor in the risk of bankruptcy in the US due to unexpected medical bills
and that you have to be on the 0.1% of Developer pools in the US, does not make it so amazing.
GP said quarter mil was typical of new grads (unqualified), not typical of elite new grads. A glance at BLS data shows that's multiples of the median wage in software.
It is highly likely that the former vice president of a startup is actually from one of those two small corners of the US (given that these also seem to be hot startup scenes), so it isn't a weird assumption for senior roles (not new grad ones). It isn't mentioned if she is a SWE or not, however, which would make a huge difference.
Incorrect. The tax code makes this kind of an offer an exception rather than a rule. There's a reason why Amazon just now upped the top $ into 300k range. That's also a reason why most of astronomical cash salaries are done as B2B via pass through entities.
The vast majority of people talking about those salaries just heard of a few people that make that money and extrapolated to the rest.
Sure, if you want to get specifically technical about it. The overall gist of what the OP was talking about is still true. At most, you could say they’re slightly exaggerating, and should reword to “It’s not at all unusual for new college grads to make $250k a year.”
I don’t think it’s overly specific. New grads out of college are a mostly unknown value that is measured using proxies like GPA and pedigree. After 2 years of employment you’ve shown what value you can bring or have been removed from the employer.
As someone who has hired a new grad into a “Senior Engineer” role, it meant the title of the salary band that met the candidate’s salary requirements to make our offer competitive with the other offers he received.
We wanted to hire a junior role since our team was already relatively senior. But the company’s salary bands were not at all competitive for entry-level developers. So we classed the new hire as senior to make it work.
Some companies’ policies are stupid and inflexible and engineers would rather just work around the problem than having to fight against HR.
I'm running a hiring competition right now for a "Senior." The pay band is less than what entry level startups pay. So we rotate through a never ending stream of kids who leave for better salaries because we don't have any higher levels.
Sometimes we do get lucky and pick up a mediocre lifer (like me) so HR sees no incentive to change.
Never take a job for a company where you are not on the value chain!
Because not everyone feels the need to rate their self-worth by how much wealth they’ve hoarded. I’m already set for retirement and I have my house nearly paid off. I’m comfortable and I don’t make $250,000 a year. I barely work more than 32 hours a week and I just got promoted. Full time work from home with a free working trip back to my old stomping grounds to catch up with friends twice a year.
Why would I break my psyche with burnout, stress, and work I despise just to make someone else exponentially more money so I can make marginally more money I don’t need? Miss me with that hustle porn, thanks.
Set for retirement can mean different things. Personally, I run the rat race so that I can retire as soon as possible. Few people actually fit the bill of “self worth = wealth hoarded.”
Maybe he bought a house in the neighborhood. Maybe he really likes writing COBOL. Maybe his spouse works there as well. Maybe he is simply extremely risk averse.
There are a number of good reasons somebody might decide to stay put, even if it might be more lucrative or exciting elsewhere.
I worked at a company where there were lots of managers, directors, and coordinators. And just as many people under them. When I reached the top of my band I had to hire someone. Not because there was more work that needed to be delegated but because I had to move up to the next title "manager" and needed at least 1 person to manage.
Prospects, if they can overcome the flattery of being offered a title beyond their skill and experience, should actually recognize such as a warning sign. After all, a company willing to do such a thing is likely a place full of stupid and inflexible policies where HR has too much power.
Sorry you have to play such games to get decent talent, but beware a nasty side effect: your actual senior engineers are going to need new titles to reflect the peer group they actually belong to. They may be (and perhaps rightly so) insulted by the insinuation that a new graduate is equally valuable to the company.
Sometimes it means “someone who can bill $300 an hour” with no relation to actual ability. I was a “senior” three years out of college and I had no clue what in the world I was doing.
Come to think of it after 20 years I kinda still feel that way.
I have demonstrated my ability to convince clients to pay amounts of money like this for my skills. And yes, the not-so-secret thing about consulting is that if you're able to convince a client that you're worth $500 an hour, it's just easy to convince them to pay $300 an hour for the work of a colleague of yours they've never seen.
Ugh, I encountered this a few times early in my career (early 2000s.) The worst case was a team from a large, expensive, high-end consulting company. There was one A player who was fast and sharp and absolutely invaluable, two developers who were slow but diligent, one guy who everybody avoided because he was pissed off that he wasn't as smart as the A player, and one engineer who spent all day in front of an IDE but never checked in any code. Once, as a prank, a couple of my coworkers sent me over to "help" this last person (to be clear, the prank was on both me and the person I was sent to help.) They were staring at code that was just syntactically wrong, and not in a subtle way. It was a Java source file, and the line that they were working on, which I think was the only line they had changed, did not look like Java. They couldn't see what was wrong with it, and honestly neither could I, in the sense that I could only see that it didn't look like Java. This person had been "working" on the project for several weeks, and from that point on, I felt intensely sorry them, because they came to work every day for eight hours, and sat in a chair looking at an IDE, going to meetings, staying late if the A player stayed late, etc., nobody ever talking to them, and I can't imagine what kind of bizarre hell that was for them. I didn't feel comfortable talking to them about it because there was an age and culture and language gap, so I'll never know. When the consulting' contract was up, we renewed, but that person was replaced with another slow but diligent worker, and I never saw them again.
god.. that hurts. I've worked 10 years in the industry, have rescued code bases and currently am lead engineer and cto of a startup. I've tried doing some moonlighting but people balk when I quote them $80/hr.
I really need a better network. plus my soft skills are terrible.
The good news is, soft skills are just skills. If you can learn JavaScript you can learn how to build relationships, or give a presentation. I know this because my soft skills used to be non-existent and now I give talks, workshops, have a podcast, and _even_ do stand up comedy.
This free course from a podcaster I listen to helped _a lot_ jordanharbinger.com/course. "Networking" is just a serious of small habits you do daily, there's zero rocket science involved. This book written by my speaking coach was a game changer for me too: https://bookyourselfsolid.com/
You hit the nail on the head though. The high rates come from relationships. Period. You don't _get_ the good gigs, you _earn_ them by providing 10x value to every client you work with and getting warm reviews from them.
I do zero machine learning, have no masters degree, and never passed any whiteboard code interview. But there's plenty of people who just need someone competent, dependable, and friendly to make their website work. Best of luck :)
While I think impostor syndrome is real, I also can't believe that so many actually have it (judging from media mostly). I cannot personally relate either. I can relate with insecurity, anxiety and so on _very_ much. But much of that has been based on a lack of experience, practice and knowledge. When those things can heal "impostor syndrome" then it's not impostor syndrome - you'd still have it.
There is also a thing that comes up after more experience rather than less: "nobody has a clue what they're doing"-syndrome.
The idea or realization that real competence or knowledge is a fad in the first place. Everyone just tries really hard to figure stuff out, but nobody _really_ achieves that. There's confidence, good communication and so on, but those things are orthogonal to what I'm describing. And I include very smart and capable people here. In the end it's all based on a "wishy-washy, good enough, it works so far, those are my assumptions" kind of deal.
Not everything is impostor syndrome. Much of it is some version of any of the above, or just plain humbleness.
The more advanced you are in your career, the more your job should be to solve novel problems. Things you, at least, haven't solved before. Preferably things nobody has solved before.
If all you're doing is work you already know how to do, you should find a more interesting job imo.
In the context of 'IT Consulting Companies,' which the blog post is about, it means that clients are paying a higher billable rate than for more 'junior' staff.
I have worked in consulting, and internally, the above was pretty-much our definition of "senior" that we used to determine who was billed out at "senior rates:" The engineers who also had customer-facing skills and coördination skills and understanding the customer's byzantine constraints skills and so forth.
Those who focused on just coding were billed out for less than those who spent time in meetings and writing words.
I was made "senior developer" three months out of university for exactly this reason. It helped that I also knew what I was doing, but the whole 1st dotcom bubble was a crazy time.
When I read "senior" I often interpret it as "has a lot of experience" which has nothing to do with skill. Speaking for myself who has a shit ton of experience in a lot of tools, techniques, languages and so on but is SHIT in most of them. I'd be hired before a lot of better candidates based on my years of experience in the area but not because of my skill in the area.
Looking at many job posts senior means capable of using React and capable of talking about, but not necessarily using, TypeScript. When senior sounds like faster junior I really have trouble finding what actually differentiates a senior from a junior at these organizations.
It's quite common in larger companies for "senior" to actually mean "mid-level" or "not junior".
This title inflation provides some flexibility to create a level below the new grad level, to hire people from non-traditional backgrounds who would otherwise fail a typical entry level screening but are willing to (temporarily) work for low $ to get themselves on the "engineering ladder".
It also makes new grad offers cosmetically/psychologically more competitive. All else being equal, if company A offers you "junior software engineer" and company B offers you "software engineer" you might favor the latter.
id agree with these points, but argue its an everything kind of package that comes within the first year of someone hiring on.
whenever I help hire a senior-level engine mechanic or technician for a shop, I need to know they can do the work without a lot of supervision. I also need to know theyll resolve the issues on the shop floor and be able to communicate those issues to a customer as well as a greenhorn tech straight out of a brake shop without chewing them up if its their fault. They need to have the ability to delegate things, get along with people and get the job done.
most of all, i dont need the team to see "a new senior mechanic just got hired." I need the team to see a new mechanic and form a consensus that she is senior based on their walk, not my talk. in that first year ill spend more time in the break room sucking down folgers and listening, or just walking the floor stocking ear plugs and soap dispensers and waiting to see what they do.
We try to map some of these titles across different companies with Levels.fyi
We also normalized some of the scope and responsibility definitions for software engineering levels based on what we've seen through company leveling rubrics that we collect: https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html
In my job, I was able to get a position just as "Software Developer." I didn't like devaluing "Software Engineer" and I didn't want to be seen as a WordPress guy if I used "Web Developer." (My job is web development with Laravel.) And lastly, I didn't want to be called "Junior" (because I have less than 5 years experience).
I think I started going to interview customers with my boss very early on my first job in the 90s. I've been given a team to manage after two years and I started doing interviews, analysis, requirements, etc on my own. Basically I was a senior engineer by then. The company was always very supportive so if I had to ask for advice I had somebody to ask to. After all 1/n-th of my boss' career depended by the outcome of my job.
Of course I'm much better at that kind of job now. I wonder how I could really understand my customers but obviously it was good enough.
My very first job even before I graduated was 'Senior' (not a brag, an indication that the title doesn't mean much.) Mid-level individual contributors at Goldman Sachs are 'Vice President'. These titles can't be read literally, can't be quantified, and can't be compared between companies. Any attempt to do so is futile.
I think what is important is once to have seen couple of times the happy path (successful project) and at least the unhappy path (unsuccessful project) and see how a senior can mitigate the repercussion of the unsuccessful project. Basically see the stuff which no book tells you.
Sometimes it means, "Able to work without someone looking over their shoulder at all times."
Sometimes it means, "Able to lead and mentor others."
And sometimes it means, "Has organizational skills above and beyond engineering skills, able to lead cross-team initiatives and deal with all the human/organization issues around the engineering."
The latter definition is the most interesting to me, it describes what "Staff" and "Principal" engineers do in most orgs. But if I had to pick a line to draw, I'd say that while a Staff or Principal spends most or all of their time working on projects that involve the human/organization issues around the engineering, a senior engineer is one who does this at least part of the time.
There are other, perfectly valid perspectives on what makes an engineer "senior," but what I like about this one that's relevant to TFA is that this kind of "seniority" is hard to fake.