I think you can certainly get the _title_ of senior in that timeline. IMO to truly be senior you need to have built a maintained a system for a few years and had to live with your earlier decisions. Also it helps to have some variety of experience. If you’ve only ever done microservices and dynamodb you’re gonna have a rough go with a monolith/rdbms.
I became a “senior dev” after 2 years, because the agency I was the sole front-end developer at hired a junior, and if we had a junior I had to be senior. Titles mean nothing outside of your current employer.
Depends on what your definition of senior engineer is... For me it means you've spent a lot of time coding and mastered a few programming languages. You're able to make use of all that they have to offer when appropriate. You understand more advanced concepts like code readability and reflexively think about long term maintenance of the code you're writing. Starting to think about larger systems, maybe also branching out into team lead type of management responsibilities, or deepening technical skill sets related to infrastructure or particular areas of expertise adjacent to software development.
This usually takes about 5 to 7 years, in my experience. After about that much time working in a focused way on software you're probably pretty "senior" at dev work, without a whole lot more to learn in terms of just getting better at coding.
The author doesn't quite fit that description. This sounds more like what happens at lots of high turnover "fast paced" startups. As people come and go from the group they find themselves in a situation where their 1 or more years of experience is allowing them to significantly outperform those with 0 to 6 months of experience. Maybe high turnover or rapid growth at the employer makes it easy to get promoted to "senior" because there are so many other truly very junior people around.
Not to belittle the author at all. Sounds like a smart guy and I admire his enthusiasm and spirit. Just sounds like crazy-startup-battlefield-promotion "senior" rather than the more rigorous definition of senior some of us might be thinking about.
The title "Senior" means nothing now, after years of title inflation. I get the feeling, purely based on personal experience, that companies hire lots of not-senior developers into Senior titles because their HR sets salaries for entry and middle tiers too low to attract decent programmers.
I have been dealing with computers since August 2000 and have never called myself "senior", even though at various interviews I went through for potential hiring, the HR and / or their managers, even one CEO said my qualifications aligned with those of a very experienced senior developer or software engineering which left me both speechless and baffling...me, senior? No way...
The reason is simple: I went for junior positions because the only web development professional experience I have is a 2-year web developer dealing with SEO stuff back in 2006 until 2008.
Now on a personal level, that's another story; I have done multiple NDA-ed projects which I could not share with them, unfortunately :/
The main "excuse" I went for junior positions is so I can enter the market and acquire what tech stack and tools companies use, in contrast to what I personally use to deliver a project.
I did describe to them what I have implemented, explained the logic behind it, but they wanted to see the actual source code which I could not share for legal reasons as I have stated (NDA).
Feel free to believe whatever you like, no worries.
This happened to me at the start of my career too. I work in video games, and started right at the end of 2d consoles (one of my first projects was a SNES game). My second job was at Sony, where I worked on the PlayStation before it’s release. The industry, all of a sudden, had a lack of programmers with skills in 3d, and so everyone was scrambling to learn it. The only people in my circle who knew 3d were ex military contractors who had worked on sims, and so there were amazing opportunities for me as a junior who had an extra year to learn the PlayStation before it was released generally, and that gave me the head start I needed to move rapidly into a senior role. When I was young, at the time, I attributed it to my good skill. Only in hindsight do I see the what amazing opportunities were brought to me by being lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, and have the foresight or ambition to take advantage of the opportunities as they presented themselves. It was easier to take risks then, with nothing to lose, but even now I don’t fear risk the way many people do, and that too is a blessing. It’s funny to look back and realize how lucky we are with the opportunities that show up for us, and I have since then been on a mission to give as many chances to people from diverse backgrounds and life stories as many opportunities as I had.
This guy seems very high energy, intense, won’t give up, into the tech, likes to build and do. Also tried different ways to learn until something got him to stick to a project. He also seems to understand self-promotion, sales, and networking. I am guessing he’s very smart and needs actual challenge to motivate himself which is why he didn’t bother finishing HS (or just didn’t write about it!).
I haven’t seen his work of course but it seems totally possible from this view.
He also seems like he got lucky starting in a constructive and productive work environment. If you don't have this level of support and opportunity in your first couple of years in industry, you're in for a much harder time. Partly because you don't learn as much, partly because you don't build as many connections, and partly because you end up learning bad habits that you need to unlearn later. Obviously a good start isn't everything, but it makes a tremendous difference, and it's almost impossible to understand if you've never seen what a bad start can be like.
These days I tend to think that anyone hung up on being a "senior" doesn't qualify as a senior, because they haven't been around long enough to know it usually means SFA. Work a few places with a variety of folk, some "senior", watch who gets promoted to "senior" and when, and you'll notice it's pretty arbitrary and often just a lever in role negotiation/retention; you want your resume to show progress, and if you aren't savvy, it can cost them nothing to throw you that bone.
As for the guy in the article: think about any junior you've ever worked with and the kind of work they're assigned. It's usually not high-impact, deep/broad, technical stuff. Hell, even non-juniors need a good few months to come up to speed in a codebase, not to mention some domains require a good bit of seat time to hit your stride as a dev. So, under 12 months of that basic junior-style work and then you're a "senior"? Not convinced
The job pays between 130-160k. He's probably on the low end of that. So he gets to make an article saying he makes 6 figures. Outside the tech world, that catches everyone's attention. All that matters is pay. Would he be senior at a company that pays actual Sr level salaries? Probably not. I made more then that as a Jr level employee at a tech company.
Promotions are an employee retention tool. In a hot market, they come by easily. In a cool market, they are harder to get. Outside of your company they might mean very little. If you get a higher salary, good for you :-)
I dropped out of high school and now make over $150K working as a developer. I mainly work as a contractor and I don't think i've once been asked if I finished high school.
With a GED? Completely. Without a GED? Much harder - not impossible, given some employers literally don't care and you can jump between those kinds of places, but it's more likely that you're making that money because you started your own company.