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#years#senior#title#junior#job#myself#experience#company#need#roles
Discussion (22 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Personally I don't think you can be a senior before ten years of fulltime work.
That's why it's so annoying to read about companies who think they can replace junior workers with AI. While imagining they're living in the future, they're not thinking about the future at all.
Author achieved the senior role, but is unsure what comes next.
As a hiring manager, I only read the bullet points. I’ve interviewed startup CTOs who were mid-level engineers at best and “Software Engineer” vanilla titled engineers who have shipped and owned impressive things over years.
The scale, complexity, and variety of the systems you’ve built, shipped, owned, and maintained trumps all else.
And yes we can see through the bullshit. Everyone has built a “semantic document retrieval system” in the last 3 years. That’s a weekend project, gonna need a little more to be impressive :)
> Why did I need validation from my org chart? > Pretty quickly realized I was being kind of a bitch. > I have a bad case of Why Not Me syndrome.
These cut deeper than faux modesty and are clearly insecurities. It's the rebelling of a sensible superego against an id hungry for validation, and the author doesn't downplay either of the two.
But yes, I'm sure he also gets a perverse thrill out of advertising his achievement, even if he intends to disparage it. It's a complicated psyche I'm rather familiar with.
It's a really bad signal when a software developer cares about their title.
All that matters is are you good at the work.
Naturally these are the least skilled of your colleagues so that part is a given. But almost all anecdotes are about them as foils. Very few about them as the next generation being mentored.
It’s so slanted that people have to actively temper the euphoria shared by tech billionaires and 100X engineers with 25+ years of non-slop code experience: well until the seniors get an immortality pill you still need to raise new 100X engineers.
Of course the response to this will be, “I never cared about titles! The “juniors I talk about have work experience ranging from zero to thirty years!”...
[1] Sources: all made up.
- I’d say SWE is an experienced engineer not a senior developer- for Pete’s sake he graduated in 2023 that was 3 freaking years ago
I’ve been developing production software for 20 years now -
What other profession counts someone with 3 years of professional experience out of college as senior?
Maybe competitive sports? Or academic math?
If it means this kid is smart and good at coding sure ill buy that but experiences and wisdom are something else entirely..
> [...] Think back (addressing you, the reader, now) to the time when you were happiest in your career or academic life. Was it when some sinecurist asshole in a gown handed you your diploma?
Uh, what? This is what this person wanted. Now after the fact they’re an anti-credentialist rebel.
Well, thinking of people who make a lot of money and then insist that money doesn’t matter. It makes sense.
> Going forward, the only person I need to impress is myself.
Thinking of the few things that I take quiet pride in because I only want to impress myself... I keep myself in check by not talking about it. lol.