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How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

blog.kuperate.com

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Re: How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

#2
I've been involved in hiring decisions on teams I've been part of for a long time now. Blatant plagiarism, obvious embellishments and more subtle BS is literally part of the game unfortunately. This is particularly prevalent when dealing with (almost) any consultancy, large and small.

I will not specifically call out names, but the some of the largest and most well known consultancies do this as a matter of practice after they overbook themselves for projects for which they do not have staff on the bench to fill.

It's sad, but honestly the prevalence of these practices (and perhaps growth of them?) only makes the genuine among us more valuable. Those who actually posses technical talent and experience will be needed more and more by companies who get burned by the frauds. Onward and upward I guess.

Re: How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

#5

The publish date on this post is today (Feb 11th) but I think I've seen this exact article posted to HN before (perhaps with a different title).

Author here. I wrote this post after my comment on the post you're mentioning was rather well received. People asked me to write about that experience in more detail, so I did and shared it here. It's a related story, not an identical one.

Re: How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

#7
There is no standard whatsoever for the adjective "Senior" when applied to engineers:

Sometimes it means, "Able to work without someone looking over their shoulder at all times."

Sometimes it means, "Able to lead and mentor others."

And sometimes it means, "Has organizational skills above and beyond engineering skills, able to lead cross-team initiatives and deal with all the human/organization issues around the engineering."

The latter definition is the most interesting to me, it describes what "Staff" and "Principal" engineers do in most orgs. But if I had to pick a line to draw, I'd say that while a Staff or Principal spends most or all of their time working on projects that involve the human/organization issues around the engineering, a senior engineer is one who does this at least part of the time.

There are other, perfectly valid perspectives on what makes an engineer "senior," but what I like about this one that's relevant to TFA is that this kind of "seniority" is hard to fake.

Re: How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

#9
post #7

There is no standard whatsoever for the adjective "Senior" when applied to engineers: Sometimes it means, "Able to work without someone looking over their shoulder at all times." Sometimes it means, "Able to lead and mentor others." And sometimes it means, "Has organizational skills above and beyond engineering skills, able to lead cross-team initiatives and deal with all the human/organization issues around the engi…

If you look around Indeed, Senior Engineer is basically equal to 5 years experience.
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