[viceroyalbean]

I saw a job posting recently looking for senior developers with 3 years of work experience. I mean, I have 3 years of full time experience + a little more experience working part time and internships, and I would consider myself a junior dev.

[steve_adams_86]

I’m in over 10 years now and I find the deeper I go, the less I like this senior title. I mean, what will I be in another 10 years? In 15? These titles are meaningless, really.

I agree though, at 3 years I was still fairly junior in the scheme of things. I was doing full stack work and building money-making applications from scratch, but it wasn’t great work. It wasn’t going to scale well, the front end was based on an ad-hoc framework because I was afraid of learning and implementing new tools like backbone.js, there were very few tests, not great internal tooling to aid workflows, I wasn’t a great mentor, etc. A lot of what I did was because it worked once before, and not because I knew exactly how and why. My fourth year was when I got my first senior title, though.

I like when companies distinguish engineering levels by capability. E1 through E7 for example, where E5+ would be approximately what people imagine when they hear the term senior. Unfortunately everyone uses different leveling, so it’s hard to adhere to that. Our industry would benefit from standards.

[KptMarchewa]

Existence of staff (and less prominently, senior staff/principal) titles is now common - IC hierarchy does not end at senior as it did few years ago at 95% companies.

[redisman]

I’m hitting 15 years in the industry. I think I’m like 3x better at my job than 10 years ago when I first got my current title