I interviewed with a company that said that.

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.

I remember discovering a long time ago there were lots of VPs at yahoo.

I like the insight of luck combined with incredible talent. Too many people get a bad taste in their mouth by leaders who only attribute success to hard work and dedication. Knowing what battles to really fight and die for is a talent in and of itself, but it's also a bit of luck to both have access to systems to allow you to impact important projects and also to end up impacting the right ones.

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.

This isn’t foolproof either and plenty of people can talk convincingly about running projects that they had little to nothing to do with.

Maybe not neccesarily exactly ten years, but you couldn't be both a junior and a senior so far as the roles have meaning. A senior is supposed to know how to function within the company and obstinately perform certain roles in their certain way, but a junior is supposed to come into the company fresh and try to simplify the work with their eyes that are not trained to do it the senior's way. Neither person is wrong but the roles need to be in opposition.

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.

That’s sort of how it works in banks where basically everyone is a VP.

I think that's rather unkind.

From my perspective: it looks like a coming of age ... blinking into adulthood sort of voyage of discovery.

Eh, kinda. But there was enough self-deprecation there that it doesn't leave a bad taste in my mouth, and I consider this a genuine reflection.

> 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.

Role is a combination of title + company.

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.

> Do we have thoughts on how important "senior"/"staff" is vs bullet points on resumes and the years of service?

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 :)

I have no idea what goes on in the minds of HR people.

I ignore job titles on resumes. I want to know what they did, I don't care what their company called them.

The title often relates to the money, which is the bit you probably want.

When you work for a company like Google, that title change determines whether or not you are taken seriously. People that get stuck at the same level are often pushed out of teams with performance improvement plans. They expect you to strive for promotion and the culture in these places is reinforcing this progression. It's mostly theater but the outcomes for people's pay is very real, thus the focus on title.

Junior programmers are the idiot foil of all anecdotes on HN in the last three years. Only juniors do that; everything went fine until the junior...; anyway, the junior sent me a eight thousand diff of obvious slop; so now I got my first gray hairs, thanks Jane Junior; juniors writing naive, clearly quadratic code.[1]

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.

I disagree and think the software model described works better when done well. I have seen this within a company, where both the hardware side and software side used the same titles (senior, staff, senior staff, principal). The hardware side used largely a combination of industry tenure and especially whether they had PHDs/patents/inventions or not to determine these titles, while the software org was very gung ho on using responsibility and influence to determine promotions. The other thing this led to is in the hardware org, often people would get hired on as senior staff or principal, while this almost never happened on the software side (nobody could get hired on as these roles as they couldn't possibly meet the rubric, as it required some outsized impact in the company with thousands of people using software you near singlehandedly developed and maintained).

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.

Kind of reminds me of martial arts. You got what some call McDojo's where a 13 year old can be a "black belt" after 9 months vs. more "traditional" styles where after 5 years of hard work you get there. For the traditional styles this black belt is generally views as "serious beginner" or internalizing the basics.

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.

Senior Engineer means many different things, even within the same company. It could mean, "This person is more productive than everybody else around them" or it could mean, "This person isn't that great at software development but they know some product area so deeply that it would be too expensive to replace them."

Haha, I know people who have worked on designing a single part smaller than a closed fist for over 5 years and were still considered just over junior because they didn't have enough experience with the system it was used in.