[raw_anon_1111]

As a 51 year old, I hate when other old people think that “back in my day things were different”

> Evans has held his present position with IBM since 1965. Previously, he had been a vice president of the Fed- eral Systems Division with the man- agement responsibility for developing large computing systems; the culmina- tion of this work was the IBM/System 360. He joined IBM in 1951 as a junior engineer and has held a variety of engineering and management posi- tions within the corporation

Dated 1969

https://bitsavers.org/magazines/Computer_Design/Computer_Des...

Next meme that needs to die: “back in my day, developers did it for the love and not the money”

[WhyOhWhyQ]

The title has always existed. I meant the obsession about being a "a junior" or "a senior", like gaining an achievement in a video game or something. I just thought every young person was a junior engineer and every old person was as senior engineer.

[raw_anon_1111]

You don’t get to be a senior engineer just because of tenure. It’s not gaming the system to expect a level to be based on the amount of responsibility and not just from getting 1 year of experience 10x.

You want a promotion because you want more money. Even though I have found the difference to not be that great on the enterprise dev side. But in BigTech and adjacent, we are talking about multiple six figures differences as you move up.

I work in consulting and our bill rate is based on our title/level of responsibility. It kills me that some non customer facing consultants want to have a “career track” that doesn’t involve leading projects and strategy and want to stay completely “hands on”.

We can hire people cheaply from outside the country that can do that. There is an IC career track that is equal to a director (manager of managers). But you won’t get there hands on keyboard.

[moondev]

The bigger the company the less impressive "senior" is. There are probably three levels of staff above it and then distinguished super fellow territory.

[I_AM_A_SMURF]

Hardly. Senior at Amazon is pretty prestigious. A Senior at Google is also a pretty nice title. In my experience smaller companies are more likely to give out the Senior title like it's nothing.

[raw_anon_1111]

A senior software engineer can easily make $300-400K+ at BigTech that’s “impressive” enough to me.

On the other hand, a “senior” working at a bank or other large non tech company will probably be making less than $175K if you aren’t working on the west coast.

For instance Delta

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/delta-air-lines/salaries

[WhyOhWhyQ]

I'm deleting my hn account. Have a good day.

[nineteen999]

It really only matters on an individual level once you become a manager, and have both juniors and seniors to manage.

[raw_anon_1111]

It matters to me as a senior+.

When I talk to a senior: “hey we got this initiative, I know only little about it. Can you talk to $stake_holder figure out what they need and come back to me and let me know your design ideas, how long you think it will take, etc”.

I can do that with a few seniors and put Epics together and they can take ownership of it.

For a junior I have to do a lot more handholding and make sure the requirements are well spelled out

[necovek]

When I was a junior engineer, I did not need almost any hand-holding, and could take ill-defined initiatives, figure out the desired goals and outcomes, and ship them.

It's just that my code would be shit (hard to understand, hard to test...), but I learned quickly to improve that through code reviews (both getting them, but also doing them) and architecture discussions. I can't thank the team enough that put up with me in my first 6-12 months :)

When I find a junior engineer like that, I give them as little as I can, and remain available to pair, review or discuss when they get stuck. And they... fly... But I also try to develop these qualities in everyone, but it's sometimes really hard to get people to recognize what is really important to get over the finish line.

And I've seen plenty of "senior+" engineers who can't do it and go on to harp about a field in a data model here or a field in a data model there, adding weeks to shipping something. So really, it is only a paygrade.

Any of those "competency matrices" are really just a way to reject anyone from that promotion they are hoping for: it won't be a blocker if that someone has this innate ability to help the team get things done.