[saghm]

> I agree on paper that this is a great heuristic, but an employer would be more than happy to pay you a junior or mid compensation while extract senior level contributions from you. I see your point, though, and I agree for the most part.

In some ways, this actually makes sense to me. In my opinion, senior versus junior engineer seems like it should be about the skills and abilities of an individual, whereas one's compensation and actual title depend on a lot of environmental circumstances (company politics, for lack of a better term). While "soft skills" are an important part of a senior engineer, I'd argue that the set of soft skills useful to an individual contributor engineer doesn't necessarily overlap a ton with the soft skills needed to be able to effectively secure a promotion and/or higher compensation; navigating the corporate bureaucracy to the benefit of the team is primarily the responsibility of the manager. Finding a way to express the "level" of an engineer separately from their situation at their current company doesn't seem that crazy to me.