It's just a pay grade. Please folks stop trying to analyze "junior," "senior," and so forth. It's just something management told HR to write down.

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WhyOhWhyQ 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

When did this "junior/senior" lingo get cool? I don't remember it being used when I was young. Maybe the leet code trend brought on a sort of gamification of the profession, with ranks etc..?

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raw_anon_1111 3 days ago | parent [-]

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”

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WhyOhWhyQ 3 days ago | parent [-]

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.

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raw_anon_1111 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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moondev 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

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

	▲	raw_anon_1111 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		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

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WhyOhWhyQ 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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

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nineteen999 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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

	▲	raw_anon_1111 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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

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tayo42 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How I became a staff engineer with 3 yoe making 140k/year

	▲	raw_anon_1111 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		And making $25K less than a new grad at BigTech…
	▲	oh_my_goodness 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		By 1 weird trick?

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raw_anon_1111 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s way more than a “pay grade” for any company with real leveling guidelines.

This jibes with both my personal experience at BigTech, knowing the industry and various publicly available leveling guidelines. Sone are more granular

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html

https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/

The company I work for now has similar leveling guidelines, it’s also more granular.

But levels are defined by scope, impact, and dealing with ambiguity

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oh_my_goodness 2 days ago | parent [-]

Is pay grade. You can look this up.

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raw_anon_1111 2 days ago | parent [-]

So are you really arguing that tech companies that pay top of the industry don’t require that you demonstrate that you can handle responsibility that requires you to be able to work at a larger scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity and go through a promotion process with a promo doc?

Are you saying that when you interview for one of those tech companies that they don’t level you according to your past experience?

Yes I know the answers to all of these questions from both personal experience of interviewing and hiring at one BigTech company and ignoring outreach from another’s hiring manager who I had worked with in the past.

(At 51, I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than ever work at a large company again and I am damn sure not going back into an office)

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2 days ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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oh_my_goodness 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If I'm being honest, I sense some ambivalence about how perfect and rational big companies really are.

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raw_anon_1111 2 days ago | parent [-]

What do you suggest? They just promote people based on tenure?

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oh_my_goodness 2 days ago | parent [-]

You've put a lot of words in my mouth, and I don't know why.

What do I suggest? I suggest that big organizations have pockets of careful, competent folks. But in general a large company tends to be all fouled up. They do a lot of things pretty much randomly. Some stuff happens the way a new graduate has a right to expect, and the way many HN commenters insist it has to go.

But a lot of other shit just ... happens. People get promoted because they have another offer from another fouled-up company, or because the boss thinks they're awesome (but sometimes the boss is dumb), or because they talk the talk exceptionally well, or because they happen to get the attention of someone 2 or 3 levels up, or whatever.

Is any of that controversial? What am I missing here?

Do people not still read Catch-22? Or has it been proved wrong or something? Or take that mysterious cactus that you mentioned in connection with large companies. What's that about? Because the cactus sounds bad.

	▲	raw_anon_1111 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I have only worked for two large companies in my career - both Fortune 10 companies when I worked their - General Electric and Amazon. At GE? Sure things are random. But it was also just another random enterprise company where it really didn’t make sense to work toward a promotion just to make $10-$20K more. You would be better off just getting another job (which I did after 2.5 years). There were no published leveling guidelines or procedures. But I can guarantee you that a random mid level developer is not going to walk up to their manager with a competing offer and be handed a promotion at any of the large tech companies. The manager by themselves can’t determine a promotion. There are promo docs, committees, recommendation requirements. Etc At 51, with just me and my wife, grown kids and already had the big house built in the burbs that sold for twice what we bought it for 8 years earlier and we downsized to a condo one third the size in state tax free Florida, the juice ain’t worth the squeeze. But if I were 22 and had a choice between wallowing in enterprise dev making 90K doing CRUD apps or making $160K out of college and over $200K at 25, I would play the game with the best of them. My own anecdote is that outside of BigTech now, I’m a staff consultant working at a 3rd party AWS consulting company making the same as a 25 year old SA that I mentored when they were an intern at AWS and the first year they came back