I caught the car(undecidability.net) |
I caught the car(undecidability.net) |
> certainly there are hard lessons that I have yet to learn in my career - but my company does not hand that title out like candy
> had (and still have) an excellent mentor <..> he had just been promoted to Senior SE. He was two years out of school himself.
I'm sure OP is a great engineer, and earned their promotion (genuinely, I am). But it sounds like his company hands out titles like candy.
As others have said titles are meaningless but I've worked with enough recruiters to know that they do have some sway on non-technical people..
Some companies do it differently but honestly this is one of the more consistent ones I’ve seen based on years of reviewing resumes. I’d never penalize someone for not having a Senior title on their resume unless I knew the company’s leveling system.
I don’t take Senior Software Engineer to mean the person is a highly advanced engineer with loads of experience though.
Everyone who reviews applicants knows that leveling systems are very different depending on the company. What you should read these articles as is: The person managed to go through their first leveling up process at work. The title for the next level happens to be Senior Software Engineer at this company.
The title could have been Software Engineer II, Software Engineer Lebel Lvl 44, or anything arbitrary. The title is not the point.
They promoted an engineer 18 months out of undergrad to senior. They said it to indicate growth potential at the company, but I saw it as a big red flag.
Understandable take. One counterpoint I would offer (with no proof, so take it or leave it) is that what I mostly see is engineers get passed up for promos that I feel they deserve. I think a large part of that is cutbacks - they haven't done layoffs, but around the time I started, they started cutting benefits, cutting RSUs, and my manager literally told me "due to budget constraints they are going to scrutinize promos very heavily going forward."
But! I don't work at a FAANG or an AI firm or anywhere with an extreme performance culture either. So regardless of YOE, if you're skilled, motivated, and a little lucky, you can really shine...
I will congratulate everyone on their first promotion, it is worth celebrating, not everyone can do this job. But this first promotion is given to everyone who can actually do the work.
Get someone good, in a greenfield project, the right start timing aligned with promo committee time, add in some luck, and sure two promos in two years are possible.
Seen this before and the worry is that they are learning is the game of the promos system, not engineering. I would have to sit them down and ask them how many years away from being the CEO do they think they are. The next promo will come slower no matter their skill and even slower after that and one day the promos will probably stop. The validation that they might be addicted to will get harder to obtain over time. Not getting a promos shouldn't "crush" you. If they assume that merit is always rewarded they should ask their boss how promo committees actually work. Many people don't get promos for reasons unrelated to merit.
The second question is where is the engineering? Only two years into a long career there is a lifetime to learn and explore. If they only chase promo they are going to burn out very quickly.
I left out a detail that might be relevant? Maybe not? I couldn't decide. SWE is actually a second career for me. I flunked out of college when I was 19, spent most of my 20s working as a chef, and then graduated college and started this job at 29. So I'm 31 now. So it's been funny to read things like "Congrats to this kid" haha.
If the post was about _how_ I got promoted that fast, I'm pretty sure this ^ would be the #1 reason. I'd already been programming for like 10 years when I started this job. People paid me (almost nothing) to write software that they still use today (much to my chagrin - it wasn't very good). So I felt like I had a "head start" compared to most of my intern cohort (though, to be clear, I still to this day feel very behind, in general).
The first 6-12 months after university are largely about 'learning how to work'. I'd say getting that out of the way is a pretty nice head start.
It takes time to do properly, though. And most of the time I just don't care about evaluating someone's capabilities like that.
- I’d say SWE is an experienced engineer not a senior developer- for Pete’s sake he graduated in 2023 that was 3 freaking years ago
I’ve been developing production software for 20 years now -
What other profession counts someone with 3 years of professional experience out of college as senior?
Maybe competitive sports? Or academic math?
If it means this kid is smart and good at coding sure ill buy that but experiences and wisdom are something else entirely..
Personally I don't think you can be a senior before ten years of fulltime work.
That's why it's so annoying to read about companies who think they can replace junior workers with AI. While imagining they're living in the future, they're not thinking about the future at all.
It's both hustle and luck. One reason I left Microsoft was because I wasn't on track there. The organization was good but also top heavy so there wasn't room for growth. When I joined Rec Room the tech I built really clicked and the company scaled rapidly. Our team became critical and helped hundreds of coworkers advance their goals. I've heard another principal engineer describe this as, "being pulled into the white hot burning center of a company".
As far as I can tell there's no "trick" to hitting the role. I'd describe it more as, "repeatedly move mountains". There's some luck identifying the right mountains and luck + hustle moving them at all.
It's very frustrating to be able to have a massive impact, but not get any sort of notice for it. Many people just start punching a clock when that happens. I've done it.
I touched on it a little bit in my post but yeah I can not overstate the role of luck, both "internal luck" (do I have a good manager) and "external luck" (did I choose the right offer out of college).
I mean sure, pat myself on the back for doing well in my intern interview, doing well in the internship and getting the return offer, doing well when I returned after school, etc... but I was damn lucky that recruiter plucked my resume out of the stack and put it on the "send a coding screen" pile when I was still in school. So yeah, the way I view it is that you have to be ready to take advantage when the luck breaks your way.
Author achieved the senior role, but is unsure what comes next.
From my perspective: it looks like a coming of age ... blinking into adulthood sort of voyage of discovery.
> Why did I need validation from my org chart? > Pretty quickly realized I was being kind of a bitch. > I have a bad case of Why Not Me syndrome.
These cut deeper than faux modesty and are clearly insecurities. It's the rebelling of a sensible superego against an id hungry for validation, and the author doesn't downplay either of the two.
But yes, I'm sure he also gets a perverse thrill out of advertising his achievement, even if he intends to disparage it. It's a complicated psyche I'm rather familiar with.
But yes, I feel a small tinge in my brain whenever I'm introduced as a "senior engineer". I'll know I've truly made it when that finally goes away.
It's a really bad signal when a software developer cares about their title.
All that matters is are you good at the work.
As a hiring manager, I only read the bullet points. I’ve interviewed startup CTOs who were mid-level engineers at best and “Software Engineer” vanilla titled engineers who have shipped and owned impressive things over years.
The scale, complexity, and variety of the systems you’ve built, shipped, owned, and maintained trumps all else.
And yes we can see through the bullshit. Everyone has built a “semantic document retrieval system” in the last 3 years. That’s a weekend project, gonna need a little more to be impressive :)
Removed a bunch of bad code and got a 1/3rd speed up
https://github.com/mhostetter/gr-adsb/pull/69
Added a new chip to qemu along with some significant peripherals. Never finished it but I did boot Linux on it I think with the upstream device tree.
Head of Eng at 50 person startup (with 25 engineers) might be Manager 2 at FAANG.
So I mostly ignore the title and look at the work history and YOE.
As an engineer, I just want to get an idea of where this person is at in their learning journey and what their personality is like, do they have certain intangibles, etc.
The recruiter who screens the person before they ever talk to me, on the other hand...
> [...] Think back (addressing you, the reader, now) to the time when you were happiest in your career or academic life. Was it when some sinecurist asshole in a gown handed you your diploma?
Uh, what? This is what this person wanted. Now after the fact they’re an anti-credentialist rebel.
Well, thinking of people who make a lot of money and then insist that money doesn’t matter. It makes sense.
> Going forward, the only person I need to impress is myself.
Thinking of the few things that I take quiet pride in because I only want to impress myself... I keep myself in check by not talking about it. lol.
As other people pointed out in this post in a roundabout way, titles only matter at all internally to a given company. And considering that, compare these two systems; yes the software org in this system does end up in a position where a 25 year old that's been at the company for 3 years could be senior staff, but that's very telling, to do that, they absolutely had to ship something novel, useful to many, and keep it running and good. Knowing that someone is a very well educated graybeard that invented something at Sun in 1989 is also some good information, but from the context of communicating with people in other orgs within a company I don't know so well, it's more valuable to me personally to understand whether they are responsible for a large running process and to what degree, moreso than how long they have been around and what they did elsewhere.
Real learning takes time. Someone with 3 years of experience writing software is at the beginning of their professional development.
Ofcourse time alone is not enough. But time x work x aptitude = progression.
The inflation of "senior engineer" makes us look to many like the McDojo black belts.
Only if you get stuck at the entry level. L5, is considered terminal and no one will push you out for not going for L6.
(Google also recently 'declared' L4 a terminal position — likely so they could be stingier with L5 promotions — but what your manager considers terminal is what matters most)
I recall giving talks where I was principal on important projects, but my title didn't reflect that so during chats after the presentation I had people ask who I was and I didn't really feel satisfied with the answer I was giving. I could tell I was being undersold just by my title. Is that their mistake? Kinda, but they're acting on the info they had available and to their read, I was not principal so someone else must have been the one who architected the project.
Of course those clued in, other devs or experienced management could tell by the talk that I lead the technical side. As much as I love just building stuff, getting my career dues would be nice.
Perhaps it's a bad signal if an engineer cares _only_ about their title though.
Naturally these are the least skilled of your colleagues so that part is a given. But almost all anecdotes are about them as foils. Very few about them as the next generation being mentored.
It’s so slanted that people have to actively temper the euphoria shared by tech billionaires and 100X engineers with 25+ years of non-slop code experience: well until the seniors get an immortality pill you still need to raise new 100X engineers.
Of course the response to this will be, “I never cared about titles! The “juniors I talk about have work experience ranging from zero to thirty years!”...
[1] Sources: all made up.
Something that complicates the problem is that not all juniors are the same.
Some juniors really just need to be shown the ropes and learn a few things and they can start contributing at mid-level. And then after a little bit of doing that they can start having Senior-level impact.
Some juniors take a little longer and need a little more help and that's totally fine, and they don't deserve to be ripped apart by smug seniors who forget they used to not know anything either.
And some juniors just don't really have the sauce and never really gravitate above mid-level, regardless of where their title ends up. Feel for these folks but they at times can be frustrating to work with.
But yes, to reiterate, in any case, the junior snark is hella annoying.
Writing and sharing it is vulnerable, and it's always drove me crazy to see people treat those who choose to do that uncharitably. I try to check them when I can (on other people's posts). I should trust others in this context to do the same.
I should probably develop a thicker skin if I'm going to blog on the internet in 2026.