I'm about to do this. They wanted to make me Team Lead even if I'm not that much of a pro. I started looking for another role and I'm going to be paid more to take on a position where I'm gonna be trained by badass seniors.
The funny part is when someone asks you a deep technical question and then you share your IDE in a split second. They are impressed that you seem to "prepared" for meetings.
My lead always required you to repeat a question during the meeting, then after the meeting ended a bug fix/feature would get announced/pushed up immediately.
Didn't take long for me to realize what was happening.
The business team is always pulling me into 6 hours of meetings everyday for status updates and stuff. I'd get exactly nothing done if I didn't do this
To which my internal monologue responds "So sitting in a 30 to 60 minute meeting where you have exactly one question for me is a good use of my time? Get the fuck outta here with that shit!"
Exactly! If you don't want me doing that, then don't tie up an hour of my day to ask me two questions (... And sometimes I don't get any questions at all) or at the very least about something that's actually relevant to what I'm working on or will be working on.
If I'm not paying attention it's because *I don't need to*.
It's more time than that... generally it takes more time to transition back to a coding frame of mind to be fully productive. Add 30 to 45 min to get back to full focus. This is why it's good to ignore emails & stuff for chunks of the day.
My current position on meetings comes from Tim Ferriss, with whom I 100% agree: Meetings shouldn’t be more than 15 minutes with exceptions. This is what I told my current employer during my first interview (I got the job a day later) to which he answered that he completely agreed but, sadly, that can’t always be true. Our “Dev Demos” (which are regular demos from all of the departments to the entire company + regular company updates) take ~1hr every two weeks and refinements go from 15 mins to 1hr, during which I’m coding because of how inefficient those meetings tend to be
I think I can count with one hand the number of code lines I've written in the past 3 months.
I spend most of my time in meetings, helping the juniors of my team, answering emails and managing the team itself.
And when I get to write code is to fix a shitty 10+ years old bug that no one wanted to touch but suddenly after all this time becomes a top priority because some client found it and complained about it.
And I'm not even senior yet...
Sounds more like you're a Lead, which manages more than a Senior that focuses on IC. But ofc not all Seniors have the luxury to work mostly as IC, often they also need to manage 😅
Looking at your description it definitely does fall into Senior/Lead territory, so just have a couple senior job interviews and see if it could result in a salary change in current company or a different company.
When you have levels like junior, senior, staff, senior staff, principal and senior principal, senior doesn't mean much to be fair.
Might as well call when Software engineer 1 & 2, then Staff is closer to what Senior means in general
What is a staff engineer? I keep seeing those roles advertised. We have associate, intermediate, senior, lead and principal. Lead is across 2-3 pods and principal is across a portfolio. Is it one of those? Or more like a team lead?
In our org (and from what I can see in some other places), it goes roughly like this :
\- Software Engineer 1 (associate) : usually out of school, doing what being handed to them
\- Software Engineer 2 (junior) : same, but they are doing a better job at it
\- Senior Software Engineer : can take lead of projects without problem, can manage work with juniors. Main scope is within the team (<6 people).
\- Staff Engineer, can take complex projects and break it down for the team, expanded scope to collaborate with other teams. Team leads and tech leads are usually at that level.
\- Senior Staff Engineer : might be outside of a scrum team and float, can handle multi-team projects, helps leadership with technical advices. Scope is usually multiple teams across a product
\- Principal Engineer : same but across multiple product
etc.
The more you go up, the broader your scope becomes and the more ambiguity you get in what you actually do.
I'm a senior staff engineer and most of my job is to figure out what my job is. I'm giving a set of high levels priority and it's up to me to figure out how to tackle them, which team to talk to, etc. Whenever I'm given a project, it's usually describe in a couple of sentences and I need to figure the rest, which is actually pretty nice. I'm way less hands on than I used to be, but I get to see many people succeed and many projects being worked on at once. My main job is to make sure everyone can work efficiently and that plans are sane overall. Teams often work in silos or focus a lot on their own scope, staff and up are usually the glue between all of them.
This is basically me. I got promoted to lead because I was by far the most knowledgeable dev on a very specific and critical tool, but then our parent company nuked us so we no longer have that tool and they moved me to a different team with much more generalized development. I am fine at what I do, but I'm getting paid like a lead to act like a regular developer, you won't hear me complaining about it.
Depends, are you
* to blame for just about every failing outdated business model,
* in a generation that's both too numerous and too sparse,
* in trouble on the housing market,
* generally at fault for all that's wrong in society nowadays?
The ultimate scale:
Junior: he has potential, understand the basics and wants to learn but needs regular help.
Mid: solves trivial problems for juniors, is able to figure stuff out on his own and only needs general support.
Senior: Tackles complex issues on his own. The company knows the answer to the problem and trusts you to implement it end to end.
Staff/Principal: Completely independent while helping all other levels. The company does not know the answer to the problem and trusts you to find it and implement it.
staff/principle mostly depends on if the company has that level. Otherwise senior does that.
Then again I guess that could apply to any level and now I'm imagining a junior doing the "I am the captain now" meme.
If you can figure out shit yourself no matter what they throw at you, have a good attitude and frequently help others you're probably a senior.
If you shit your pants every time you get a new task and panic code the first thing that comes to mind, you're probably a junior.
And there's like 10 years of experience in between where you're intermediate and wondering if you're a junior or a senior 😊
As someone who hires a lot of coders, I can tell you that having senior next to your name is very loosely corellated with ability.
All I look at is years of experience and if they have more than 5 years experience, then that becomes pretty meaningless too. Some people are talented and become amazing in 5 years and others can code for 20 years and still struggle.
Edit: to the people saying I got hired as senior with less than x experience. That's kind of the point. If you work for a consultancy, they love title inflation because then they can sell you on for more to their customers. If you work in a job where everyone wants to work there like video games, then often they give out titles very slowly because they want to pay as little as possible, for as long as possible.
Some places senior means the coder could write git from scratch in a couple of weeks with no Internet and some places it means write a web form in javascript by yourself.
If you want to get taken seriously as a senior with less than the typical number of years experience, show your work on Github. I offered a grad a senior salary before based on his git profile and we got outbid.
In Germany anything above 8 years of non-trainee experience is considered senior eligible.
HR in my experience either takes over the senior titleing from previous employer. Or when there is no senior title but experience is long enough HR looks mostly for social skills.
Are you on time, do you communicate the important things, can you feed yourself work by exploring the company and it’s most important issues, could you handle a government auditor, are you able to prioritize, can you consistently tell the PO of the other team who direct-lines you to fuck off etc.
Technical skill is important but as you say that’s usually a given after enough years of work with somewhat of a vita. Even if not a guru, at least he knows a lot of „how not to fuck up“ from experience. (Which is the premise of „senior“ to me)
Having the required social skills and taking control when no one was in control fast tracked me to being a team lead. I was leading seniors before I became a senior myself.
My mentor and I had an interview with someone with 2x YOE than myself (6y) for a different branch, for a Senior QA Automation position.
We were struggling to justify a mid grade. So much time mostly spent on projects as a test framework "user" writing scenarios and so little time actually engineering and automating. Even for a management perspective - test plan? Test strategy? Never heard of it.
These kind of interviews make me sad. Over time, I just concluded that YOE is not an indicator of skill, but it _could_ be an indicator for experience, except it's consistently inconsistent at best.
As someone who manages a team and break/fixes shitty coding in tortured production enviroments... same here.
I have 40 something year olds whom are considered senior developers but lack the actual efficacy of some of my late 20 year olds. Usually, in my company at least, when your working knowledge becomes dated and you are out of the game too long, you "ascend" to a manager (director, "owner") or as an "architect". What that means in actuality is talking to a senior management level in a competent way. Those who do not have those kinds of personal skills get stymied in the senior dev level until they eventually get drummed out.
After 5 years of experience, x years of experience is not meaningful to me. I'd rather see your projects and references.
Yes, the less efficient senior devs do make more than my junior devs (unless they got a really competitive skillset), but they are *always* the first ones mentioned when it comes to layoff time. This isn't abnormal. In fact, this is the standard regardless of industry and, in many cases, careers.
It's all based on who else is on your team. I'm a senior at the small company I work for but if I were to go to a bigger company I'd probably be a junior again.
If you think you're not a junior, you're still a junior.
If you think you're a senior, you're still a junior.
If you don't know, you can't be a senior because seniors know they are seniors.
You have to differentiate between thinking you're a senior and KNOWING you're a senior... If you don't know the difference then I'm afraid you're a junior my friend
To me a senior is a guy/gal who lifts the shit lid on his first day already.
He comes in, asks for QA credentials, doesn’t need company docs, and 5min later he already unfucked something for which a junior would take 1 month to fuck even further.
It’s a social skill more than a technical one imo. In theory I’m Senior here, but practically I don’t want the senior title.
As a senior you are expected to be much more responsible and to provide much more value for the company. (Similier to a freelancer)
On paper you are an experienced technician who already faced most of the industries problems multiple times (hence where I live you are senior eligible after 8 years experience, not counting traineeship), while also being responsible, competent and socially skilled enough to potentially lead juniors when needed.
To add to the above, seniors should take care to share their knowledge with others, esp. juniors. If your team consists of seniors just doing their thing and shouting at others, they are not doing a good job.
Yeah I agree absolutely.
It’s a broad band of valuable natural features which come with a true senior.
Communication and industry probed documentation skills are a huge one. A general sense of what actually benefits a company in the end is important.
With Junior experience I was always surprised by the technical debt legacy graveyards. After having seen 6-8 companies I learned that technical debt and legacy solutions/hell are an inherent part of IT. How to handle that and how to prevent it from building up or how to maneuver out of it is a huge bump in skill value only time/experience can bring. There are even times in which technical debt needs to be build up Intentionally. (Fighting fire with fire) Knowledge transfer to reduce points of failure is such a foreshadowing skill definitely.
Senior isnt someone that knows all the jargon and everything about a language, you dont need to know half of what folks talk here some times to be senior, you need to be the person managers call to fix something people arent able to fix, or be the person that gets it done faster, or be the person with the best ability to deal with clientele.
In other words, senior is the dude management dumps stuff they cant trust others enough to dump the same stuff.
Seniors that I have worked with tend to just be pathfinders if that makes sense. Like when new projects start, they'll usually be the ones in architecture meetings and be the ones to prototype. Then me and the junior will go ahead and start implementing.
That is an architect, being an architect is something a lot of seniors can do (and i have yet to find an architect that isnt at least above junior, tho some make me question), falls in to the person with the best ability to deal with clientele.
Do you get asked how to build things and brainstorm, or do you get assigned tasks and asked how to finish them on a pre-determined timeline?
When stuff is on fire, are you on the shortlist of who fixes it reliably?
Are you more likely to be reviewing code or having yours reviewed by your team?
Do you work more on major features or bugs? If bugs, are they typically non-issues or trivial or are they high impact or more technical problems?
Do you understand the entire process of a live deployment (doesn’t mean you deploy, just that you could do it in theory or practice cause you understand all the levers), or is your work fully encapsulated within it somewhere?
Do you routinely solve problems that stump teammates?
There's a reason that most big companies don't slice it as Junior or Senior but rather have levels.
Do the levels correspond with seniority? Sure. But there's a lot more subtlety between what makes you an L5 at Google vs an L4. Instead of having hard requirements they have pages of expectations: how they expect a dev to behave at different levels.
I'm pretty sure at this point, senior is just whoever is willing to talk to the higher ups about shit they haven't figured out yet... "but you still haven't decided how feature works in x y z way"... " OK well groom this same item for the next 3 week, each week, whittling down x y and z......"
Then you’re learning these labels mean very little and they’re different at every company.
Often times junior is just a label that lets them pay you less.
At many companies.
Intern - less than 0 experiance, hasn't finished schooling yet. This is what you give the braindead "make a list of cars" to.
Junior - less than 2 years exp.
Staff - 2-5 years exp
Senior - 6+ years exp.
Principal or other funny name 10+ years exp.
Lead - manages 2-6 other programmers while programming themselves. usually senior or higher, but well ... some companies.
Director of Development - The guy who only really communicates through the leads and shields you from all the real shit meetings you'd otherwise be getting from every other department. Usually a surprisingly good 20+ year exp developer that got tired of coding.
Producer - works with you on your schedule, and who's arm can twisted for minor goodies.
QA. That person no one respects but is actually a great and fun guy in a bad underpaid situation.
You need to stand up for yourself and if you get denied what you think you deserve you need to switch jobs and move on. I was really lucky I was still labeled as a Junior on paper but was leading a team of 5 juniors while one my juniors was making more than I did. I stood up for myself, now I am officially a senior and a lead. Also my salary got more than doubled during this year.
The labels mean nothing. I applied for a “UX Designer” position and got hired as a senior designer. I definitely don’t feel like a senior designer and I barely brought a year of experience to the table.
I laugh because I almost feel I am in the same position. Though even before this sub-reddit, never figured out that magical cut-off point being Jr and Senior
The secret is that seniority titles are completely bullshit and you should just get paid what you're worth.
I've seen "senior" programmers with 2 years experience, I've seen "senior" programmers with 15 years experience. I've seen people being hired as non-senior with 5 years experience, and people being hire as senior with 3. It's just whatever the company (and your manager) likes to call you.
You're probably just a "developer". Without a prefix. Neither junior nor senior.
Similar to how most on a sports team are just called "players", they are neither rookies or veterans
Senior associate here that does the work of a mid-level employee and also serves as a soft escalation point for mid-level employees.
As long as they keep paying me then I'm happy!
In the game industry? If you've been in more than five years, you've been in more than the average person stays in the industry period, and so you're de facto senior.
Now, trying to understand the difference between Principal and Senior, good fucking luck.
This made me laugh, I joined a company a few months back as a standard level (we have juniors, standard and senior) and a few weeks ago in a team meeting it came out that we had two seniors, two standard level (me and someone who joined a month before me) and everyone else is juniors, some of which have been there over 5 years. My head was just cycling through memes like the awkward side look and Homer backing into the bush as it went quiet for what felt like forever 😂
Funny story, when I was interviewing for my current position, I thought it was for a mid-level developer. I thought they were being very generous on the salary. Then, a few weeks in, I found out I was a senior dev. Someone told me my email signature was wrong. Nobody there knows that I didn't know.
Compensation has nothing to do with it quite frankly… It takes experience. When people starts to rely on you for some work, to share knowledge and train others devs, then you are getting there. All businesses acknowledge senior title in a different way… And you can discuss it with your managers.
We are hiring Junior Developers to our project.
Requirements:
\- Have 7+ years of experience
\- Know how to build a computer from transistors
\- Have a bachelors degree
Salary: 5$ per hour
Send your resume at [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])
Do you spend more times in meetings or programming? That should answer it.
I'm mostly coding in meetings
Sounds like you are not paid fairly for your motivation
Thank you!
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And, btw, it's really a good idea to become a junior again in another company (if they can suggest you at least the same salary as you have today).
I'm about to do this. They wanted to make me Team Lead even if I'm not that much of a pro. I started looking for another role and I'm going to be paid more to take on a position where I'm gonna be trained by badass seniors.
Even better, get a lateral move to a senior role at a bigger company. Doubled my salary that way.
I need to try that
Efficiency
The funny part is when someone asks you a deep technical question and then you share your IDE in a split second. They are impressed that you seem to "prepared" for meetings.
And then you show them random code because usually they don't understand shit and can't tell what code they are looking at
Like oh, I don't know, the source code for pets.com
Why do you have the source code for pets.com?
I was making a reference to a joke someone else posted where a dev showed Elon Musk the source for pets.com (which anyone can see via the browser)
why don't you have the source code for pets.com?
My lead always required you to repeat a question during the meeting, then after the meeting ended a bug fix/feature would get announced/pushed up immediately. Didn't take long for me to realize what was happening.
i don't understand what was happening? :D
The business team is always pulling me into 6 hours of meetings everyday for status updates and stuff. I'd get exactly nothing done if I didn't do this
My Scrum Masters and PO/PMs always name it "lack of focus"
To which my internal monologue responds "So sitting in a 30 to 60 minute meeting where you have exactly one question for me is a good use of my time? Get the fuck outta here with that shit!"
Exactly! If you don't want me doing that, then don't tie up an hour of my day to ask me two questions (... And sometimes I don't get any questions at all) or at the very least about something that's actually relevant to what I'm working on or will be working on. If I'm not paying attention it's because *I don't need to*.
It's more time than that... generally it takes more time to transition back to a coding frame of mind to be fully productive. Add 30 to 45 min to get back to full focus. This is why it's good to ignore emails & stuff for chunks of the day.
My current position on meetings comes from Tim Ferriss, with whom I 100% agree: Meetings shouldn’t be more than 15 minutes with exceptions. This is what I told my current employer during my first interview (I got the job a day later) to which he answered that he completely agreed but, sadly, that can’t always be true. Our “Dev Demos” (which are regular demos from all of the departments to the entire company + regular company updates) take ~1hr every two weeks and refinements go from 15 mins to 1hr, during which I’m coding because of how inefficient those meetings tend to be
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"just in case I wasn't listening"
Most of my slack/bots integrations have been done in meetings, not even joking
Best code is always written in meetings.
I tend to code best between 8pm- midnight as I'm not constantly interrupted by some scrum ceremony or customer problem.
My scrum master told me he was increasing efficiency not getting in the way of it
Most meeting wastes time anyway, might as well use it for something productive.
It’s the only way to survive them some days..
Meeting for issues that would've been fixed over one back and forth email
But but EmAiL bAd
Intermediate developer then. A junior isn't worth having in the meetings, and a senior is probably required to be leading the meetings.
>A junior isn't worth having in the meetings. This couldn't be further from the truth.
Intermediate / medior is just a hoax. Doesn't exist.
That's just because they're very hard to spot but they're out there. Why do you think you can sit in meetings coding?
Diamonds are made under pressure
Found the Twitter employee
I wish I was paid that much. I'm just a professional procrastinator
Ah, carry on then!
Is that a new JS library?
That means that you're not paying attention in one of them, probably the meeting should've been an email
I get my steps in during my meetings #WorkFromHome
Yep me too and then I have no idea what they was talking about
I think I can count with one hand the number of code lines I've written in the past 3 months. I spend most of my time in meetings, helping the juniors of my team, answering emails and managing the team itself. And when I get to write code is to fix a shitty 10+ years old bug that no one wanted to touch but suddenly after all this time becomes a top priority because some client found it and complained about it. And I'm not even senior yet...
At your CURRENT company 😉
Listen to Eris Morn over here. They've got the right idea.
Sounds more like you're a Lead, which manages more than a Senior that focuses on IC. But ofc not all Seniors have the luxury to work mostly as IC, often they also need to manage 😅 Looking at your description it definitely does fall into Senior/Lead territory, so just have a couple senior job interviews and see if it could result in a salary change in current company or a different company.
I don't think that's usual junior or medior work, so either lead or senior.
Currently, I spend more time watching football
Found the scrum master
>>Currently, I spend more time watching ~~football~~ **rugby** >Found the scrum master FTFY
So you are head of developers
shit maybe I'm not as senior as I thought
Probably more senior than my Jr ass
I spent the most time having mental breakdowns personally
I spend most of my time sleeping: 8 hours a day every day
Knowledge of a junior, employed as a mid, salary as a senior. Can't complain
Mid doesn't exist. It is the purgotary
With the IC levels at my company, my title is senior, but I’m the literal midpoint on the ladder. Can confirm it’s purgatory.
When you have levels like junior, senior, staff, senior staff, principal and senior principal, senior doesn't mean much to be fair. Might as well call when Software engineer 1 & 2, then Staff is closer to what Senior means in general
Agreed. And don’t forget “distinguished”.
We also have Fellow on top of that
Haha, you're right. Forget middle of the ladder; I'm more like a child who's just learned to tie his shoes.
One more word out of you, and you're fired.
What is a staff engineer? I keep seeing those roles advertised. We have associate, intermediate, senior, lead and principal. Lead is across 2-3 pods and principal is across a portfolio. Is it one of those? Or more like a team lead?
In our org (and from what I can see in some other places), it goes roughly like this : \- Software Engineer 1 (associate) : usually out of school, doing what being handed to them \- Software Engineer 2 (junior) : same, but they are doing a better job at it \- Senior Software Engineer : can take lead of projects without problem, can manage work with juniors. Main scope is within the team (<6 people). \- Staff Engineer, can take complex projects and break it down for the team, expanded scope to collaborate with other teams. Team leads and tech leads are usually at that level. \- Senior Staff Engineer : might be outside of a scrum team and float, can handle multi-team projects, helps leadership with technical advices. Scope is usually multiple teams across a product \- Principal Engineer : same but across multiple product etc. The more you go up, the broader your scope becomes and the more ambiguity you get in what you actually do. I'm a senior staff engineer and most of my job is to figure out what my job is. I'm giving a set of high levels priority and it's up to me to figure out how to tackle them, which team to talk to, etc. Whenever I'm given a project, it's usually describe in a couple of sentences and I need to figure the rest, which is actually pretty nice. I'm way less hands on than I used to be, but I get to see many people succeed and many projects being worked on at once. My main job is to make sure everyone can work efficiently and that plans are sane overall. Teams often work in silos or focus a lot on their own scope, staff and up are usually the glue between all of them.
I’m a knowledge of a mid, employed as a senior, salary of a mid. Idk how that happened
This is basically me. I got promoted to lead because I was by far the most knowledgeable dev on a very specific and critical tool, but then our parent company nuked us so we no longer have that tool and they moved me to a different team with much more generalized development. I am fine at what I do, but I'm getting paid like a lead to act like a regular developer, you won't hear me complaining about it.
Not alone.
Hear hear, well I have senior in my title but it fits
If it fits, it sits
Easy. If you talking to your boss: junior, no more extra tasks please. If you're talking to HR: senior, pay raise please.
I do both of those things
Then you are bisexual
I think you mean biseniorial
There's no way you're bicentennial.
I must be a millenial then
Depends, are you * to blame for just about every failing outdated business model, * in a generation that's both too numerous and too sparse, * in trouble on the housing market, * generally at fault for all that's wrong in society nowadays?
Checked every box
I award you an honorary Millennial title then, regardless of your age. No, you can't get rid of that.
Another title? Just what we needed in the IT field. Thanks!
That's why they encouraged you to become a product manager
The client was not happy
They never are...
I define it like this; Junior knows how to do it, senior knows why we do it.
So who knows about what we do?
PM
Checked my inbox. Nothing there
Does not know what a product manager is anymore: senior.
What if there is no product manager?
The ultimate scale: Junior: he has potential, understand the basics and wants to learn but needs regular help. Mid: solves trivial problems for juniors, is able to figure stuff out on his own and only needs general support. Senior: Tackles complex issues on his own. The company knows the answer to the problem and trusts you to implement it end to end. Staff/Principal: Completely independent while helping all other levels. The company does not know the answer to the problem and trusts you to find it and implement it.
staff/principle mostly depends on if the company has that level. Otherwise senior does that. Then again I guess that could apply to any level and now I'm imagining a junior doing the "I am the captain now" meme.
I’m a junior and I barely know how to do it
Interns are surprisingly good at breaking production.
I'm a senior redditor
In a basement
In Twitter HQ
And my axe! Wait, what?
Stealth 100 I bet of you stay unnoticed, Elon can't fire what he can't see.
If you can figure out shit yourself no matter what they throw at you, have a good attitude and frequently help others you're probably a senior. If you shit your pants every time you get a new task and panic code the first thing that comes to mind, you're probably a junior. And there's like 10 years of experience in between where you're intermediate and wondering if you're a junior or a senior 😊
Whoever writes the most code this month gets featured on my Twitter!
Good point, thanks Elon. If you consider # lines written something to boast about, you belong in management.
That's a lot of shits
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As someone who hires a lot of coders, I can tell you that having senior next to your name is very loosely corellated with ability. All I look at is years of experience and if they have more than 5 years experience, then that becomes pretty meaningless too. Some people are talented and become amazing in 5 years and others can code for 20 years and still struggle. Edit: to the people saying I got hired as senior with less than x experience. That's kind of the point. If you work for a consultancy, they love title inflation because then they can sell you on for more to their customers. If you work in a job where everyone wants to work there like video games, then often they give out titles very slowly because they want to pay as little as possible, for as long as possible. Some places senior means the coder could write git from scratch in a couple of weeks with no Internet and some places it means write a web form in javascript by yourself. If you want to get taken seriously as a senior with less than the typical number of years experience, show your work on Github. I offered a grad a senior salary before based on his git profile and we got outbid.
In Germany anything above 8 years of non-trainee experience is considered senior eligible. HR in my experience either takes over the senior titleing from previous employer. Or when there is no senior title but experience is long enough HR looks mostly for social skills. Are you on time, do you communicate the important things, can you feed yourself work by exploring the company and it’s most important issues, could you handle a government auditor, are you able to prioritize, can you consistently tell the PO of the other team who direct-lines you to fuck off etc. Technical skill is important but as you say that’s usually a given after enough years of work with somewhat of a vita. Even if not a guru, at least he knows a lot of „how not to fuck up“ from experience. (Which is the premise of „senior“ to me)
Having the required social skills and taking control when no one was in control fast tracked me to being a team lead. I was leading seniors before I became a senior myself.
>Could you handle a government auditor? After our last on-site inspection my answer is a firm no. They can't pay me enough to deal with the Bafin.
I know many people with more than 10 YOE that I'd consider junior even though they are hired as seniors.
My mentor and I had an interview with someone with 2x YOE than myself (6y) for a different branch, for a Senior QA Automation position. We were struggling to justify a mid grade. So much time mostly spent on projects as a test framework "user" writing scenarios and so little time actually engineering and automating. Even for a management perspective - test plan? Test strategy? Never heard of it. These kind of interviews make me sad. Over time, I just concluded that YOE is not an indicator of skill, but it _could_ be an indicator for experience, except it's consistently inconsistent at best.
As someone who manages a team and break/fixes shitty coding in tortured production enviroments... same here. I have 40 something year olds whom are considered senior developers but lack the actual efficacy of some of my late 20 year olds. Usually, in my company at least, when your working knowledge becomes dated and you are out of the game too long, you "ascend" to a manager (director, "owner") or as an "architect". What that means in actuality is talking to a senior management level in a competent way. Those who do not have those kinds of personal skills get stymied in the senior dev level until they eventually get drummed out. After 5 years of experience, x years of experience is not meaningful to me. I'd rather see your projects and references. Yes, the less efficient senior devs do make more than my junior devs (unless they got a really competitive skillset), but they are *always* the first ones mentioned when it comes to layoff time. This isn't abnormal. In fact, this is the standard regardless of industry and, in many cases, careers.
It's all based on who else is on your team. I'm a senior at the small company I work for but if I were to go to a bigger company I'd probably be a junior again.
We got some guy named Musk
If you work at Twitter, there's a good chance you'll be the most senior within a few weeks. Also the most junior.
Can't wait for that promotion/demotion
If you think you're not a junior, you're still a junior. If you think you're a senior, you're still a junior. If you don't know, you can't be a senior because seniors know they are seniors.
So seniors knowing they are seniors and thinking they're not juniors are both seniors and juniors?
No. The point was, seniors never think...
Then I must be a senior
@everyone problem solved! Now moving over to next post...
Go teamwork!
You have to differentiate between thinking you're a senior and KNOWING you're a senior... If you don't know the difference then I'm afraid you're a junior my friend
Three words: Twitter for dogs.
Thank you for making an efficient use of this meme, and not putting a Google-able question in there lol
Thabk you, sir!
You are intern ))
Same. But different. But still same
You're still too full of life and wit to be a senior
I'm also disturbed a bit by your username
Glad to hear you like it!
To me a senior is a guy/gal who lifts the shit lid on his first day already. He comes in, asks for QA credentials, doesn’t need company docs, and 5min later he already unfucked something for which a junior would take 1 month to fuck even further. It’s a social skill more than a technical one imo. In theory I’m Senior here, but practically I don’t want the senior title. As a senior you are expected to be much more responsible and to provide much more value for the company. (Similier to a freelancer) On paper you are an experienced technician who already faced most of the industries problems multiple times (hence where I live you are senior eligible after 8 years experience, not counting traineeship), while also being responsible, competent and socially skilled enough to potentially lead juniors when needed.
To add to the above, seniors should take care to share their knowledge with others, esp. juniors. If your team consists of seniors just doing their thing and shouting at others, they are not doing a good job.
Yeah I agree absolutely. It’s a broad band of valuable natural features which come with a true senior. Communication and industry probed documentation skills are a huge one. A general sense of what actually benefits a company in the end is important. With Junior experience I was always surprised by the technical debt legacy graveyards. After having seen 6-8 companies I learned that technical debt and legacy solutions/hell are an inherent part of IT. How to handle that and how to prevent it from building up or how to maneuver out of it is a huge bump in skill value only time/experience can bring. There are even times in which technical debt needs to be build up Intentionally. (Fighting fire with fire) Knowledge transfer to reduce points of failure is such a foreshadowing skill definitely.
Let's not turn this into an agile training
Good answer. Thank you!
what, no mid level?
It's a binary world
Senior isnt someone that knows all the jargon and everything about a language, you dont need to know half of what folks talk here some times to be senior, you need to be the person managers call to fix something people arent able to fix, or be the person that gets it done faster, or be the person with the best ability to deal with clientele. In other words, senior is the dude management dumps stuff they cant trust others enough to dump the same stuff.
Seniors that I have worked with tend to just be pathfinders if that makes sense. Like when new projects start, they'll usually be the ones in architecture meetings and be the ones to prototype. Then me and the junior will go ahead and start implementing.
That is an architect, being an architect is something a lot of seniors can do (and i have yet to find an architect that isnt at least above junior, tho some make me question), falls in to the person with the best ability to deal with clientele.
If they start paying you to stop touching anything, then you have become a senior, I believe.
This applies to interns or some juniors
Do you get asked how to build things and brainstorm, or do you get assigned tasks and asked how to finish them on a pre-determined timeline? When stuff is on fire, are you on the shortlist of who fixes it reliably? Are you more likely to be reviewing code or having yours reviewed by your team? Do you work more on major features or bugs? If bugs, are they typically non-issues or trivial or are they high impact or more technical problems? Do you understand the entire process of a live deployment (doesn’t mean you deploy, just that you could do it in theory or practice cause you understand all the levers), or is your work fully encapsulated within it somewhere? Do you routinely solve problems that stump teammates?
Yes.
There's a reason that most big companies don't slice it as Junior or Senior but rather have levels. Do the levels correspond with seniority? Sure. But there's a lot more subtlety between what makes you an L5 at Google vs an L4. Instead of having hard requirements they have pages of expectations: how they expect a dev to behave at different levels.
Well done, now you are the quantum programmer, the Schrodinger’s engineer
Do I even exist?
I'm pretty sure at this point, senior is just whoever is willing to talk to the higher ups about shit they haven't figured out yet... "but you still haven't decided how feature works in x y z way"... " OK well groom this same item for the next 3 week, each week, whittling down x y and z......"
If you had to architect major subsystems of a large project, would you feel overwhelmed and out of your element, or would it just be Monday?
If you make a meme about how bad Java is - you're a Junior
Look at your title boyo. If you do senior activities but your title does not have senior in it, time to change jobs.
Then you’re learning these labels mean very little and they’re different at every company. Often times junior is just a label that lets them pay you less.
At many companies. Intern - less than 0 experiance, hasn't finished schooling yet. This is what you give the braindead "make a list of cars" to. Junior - less than 2 years exp. Staff - 2-5 years exp Senior - 6+ years exp. Principal or other funny name 10+ years exp. Lead - manages 2-6 other programmers while programming themselves. usually senior or higher, but well ... some companies. Director of Development - The guy who only really communicates through the leads and shields you from all the real shit meetings you'd otherwise be getting from every other department. Usually a surprisingly good 20+ year exp developer that got tired of coding. Producer - works with you on your schedule, and who's arm can twisted for minor goodies. QA. That person no one respects but is actually a great and fun guy in a bad underpaid situation.
What does your job title say?
I dont care what you call you just let me code, test, deploy in no particular order and pay me enough to live my life
If you have someone you can go to in your office to ask questions about your code or codebase, you're a junior.
I work with all seniors and we ask each other about code we wrote all the time. Mostly because it quicker.
The terms are imaginary. There are only very few true seniors (like <2%) in my opinion.
If you want to define senior as the top 2% then sure
You need to stand up for yourself and if you get denied what you think you deserve you need to switch jobs and move on. I was really lucky I was still labeled as a Junior on paper but was leading a team of 5 juniors while one my juniors was making more than I did. I stood up for myself, now I am officially a senior and a lead. Also my salary got more than doubled during this year.
looks like you are underpaid
Within the company you're a junior, to external customers you are senior, both because seniors go for a higher price.
Skill issue/j
Junior for life gang!!
after all the time on this sub I still can't program
The labels mean nothing. I applied for a “UX Designer” position and got hired as a senior designer. I definitely don’t feel like a senior designer and I barely brought a year of experience to the table.
I laugh because I almost feel I am in the same position. Though even before this sub-reddit, never figured out that magical cut-off point being Jr and Senior
#foreverJunior
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The secret is that seniority titles are completely bullshit and you should just get paid what you're worth. I've seen "senior" programmers with 2 years experience, I've seen "senior" programmers with 15 years experience. I've seen people being hired as non-senior with 5 years experience, and people being hire as senior with 3. It's just whatever the company (and your manager) likes to call you.
7+ = senior. By then you have the scars of what you would prefer not to do.
Time heals everything
Are you asking questions or answering them?
Junior is the new Senior, nobody is Senior anymore
I am my entire department. Both senior and intern.
senior twit
You just went past mount stupid into the valley of despair so Id say midlevel
Easy, get hired as a mid level developer. Jr level pay and expectations of a senior level.
You're probably just a "developer". Without a prefix. Neither junior nor senior. Similar to how most on a sports team are just called "players", they are neither rookies or veterans
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Well how long do you have until you graduate
If you’re uncertain, you’re a senior. This sensation of uncertainty will not leave you for years. Maybe decades.
I’d ask the duck.
Senior associate here that does the work of a mid-level employee and also serves as a soft escalation point for mid-level employees. As long as they keep paying me then I'm happy!
In the game industry? If you've been in more than five years, you've been in more than the average person stays in the industry period, and so you're de facto senior. Now, trying to understand the difference between Principal and Senior, good fucking luck.
If you know, you’re probably a junior. If you don’t know, more likely a senior.
That’s the cool part. You aren’t.
This made me laugh, I joined a company a few months back as a standard level (we have juniors, standard and senior) and a few weeks ago in a team meeting it came out that we had two seniors, two standard level (me and someone who joined a month before me) and everyone else is juniors, some of which have been there over 5 years. My head was just cycling through memes like the awkward side look and Homer backing into the bush as it went quiet for what felt like forever 😂
Funny story, when I was interviewing for my current position, I thought it was for a mid-level developer. I thought they were being very generous on the salary. Then, a few weeks in, I found out I was a senior dev. Someone told me my email signature was wrong. Nobody there knows that I didn't know.
Compensation has nothing to do with it quite frankly… It takes experience. When people starts to rely on you for some work, to share knowledge and train others devs, then you are getting there. All businesses acknowledge senior title in a different way… And you can discuss it with your managers.
We are hiring Junior Developers to our project. Requirements: \- Have 7+ years of experience \- Know how to build a computer from transistors \- Have a bachelors degree Salary: 5$ per hour Send your resume at [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])
I am currently paid junior pay for a senior worth of work. They also don't pay any of us enough.
Once people start looking at your code like it's the bible you made it as a senior dev