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How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

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

#61

Post by nimbius »

a4isms wrote: 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…

id agree with these points, but argue its an everything kind of package that comes within the first year of someone hiring on.

whenever I help hire a senior-level engine mechanic or technician for a shop, I need to know they can do the work without a lot of supervision. I also need to know theyll resolve the issues on the shop floor and be able to communicate those issues to a customer as well as a greenhorn tech straight out of a brake shop without chewing them up if its their fault. They need to have the ability to delegate things, get along with people and get the job done.

most of all, i dont need the team to see "a new senior mechanic just got hired." I need the team to see a new mechanic and form a consensus that she is senior based on their walk, not my talk. in that first year ill spend more time in the break room sucking down folgers and listening, or just walking the floor stocking ear plugs and soap dispensers and waiting to see what they do.

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

#62

Post by silicon2401 »

wccrawford wrote: post #52
druadh wrote: post #41

Not senior, but junior... I recently started Web Development (well, it's been almost a year now). I am technically in a 'Junior' position, but I've read articles stating that it's only detrimental to list yourself as a Junior. What are your thoughts? Am I still a Junior after a year? Should I keep the "Junior" label on my resume/linkedin if I'm still a Junior?

My standard advice is to use a job title that fits your ability. If you don't, it's going to be a bad fit. That said, if you're looking for a new job and are still a junior, you're probably switching far too quickly. My plan was to switch at 3 years experience, at which point I'd drop the junior title for sure. I ended up staying longer (because they increased my pay very well the first 3 years, and then started scre…

> That said, if you're looking for a new job and are still a junior, you're probably switching far too quickly.

couldn't disagree more. people should change jobs every week if they're able to. why stay at company A making X, if company B is willing to hire you now, for 1.5-3x? if you stay at a company for an arbitrarily long period of time, you're just throwing away tons of money

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

#63

Post by softwaredoug »

Staff is the new senior

Senior is the new “mid level” dev

Dev is the new “junior” dev

Especially in times when managers want to retain their best, they often can’t get HR to budge on salaries. So they promote them to get them into a competitive salary range.

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

#64

Post by selestify »

gambiting wrote: post #53
yunyu wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A quarter million dollars is what a typical new grad offer looks like nowadays

I love how HN sometimes behaves as if the entire world is one or two small corners of the US.

If you graduate from any top 10 school in the US — which plenty of people do — it is indeed a pretty typical offer

Love how I’m downvoted for pointing out a fact. I mean, for fuck’s sake, look at levels.fyi. And look at how many people FAANG and FAANG-adjacent startups hire every year. It’s really not that rare. But hey, stay in denial.

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

#65

Post by spatley »

druadh wrote: post #41

Not senior, but junior... I recently started Web Development (well, it's been almost a year now). I am technically in a 'Junior' position, but I've read articles stating that it's only detrimental to list yourself as a Junior. What are your thoughts? Am I still a Junior after a year? Should I keep the "Junior" label on my resume/linkedin if I'm still a Junior?

I would avoid the junior label, I see most backgrounds listed as `web developer` and then promoted to `senior web developer`

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

#66

Post by zo1 »

throwaway643464 wrote: post #33
nicholasjarnold wrote: post #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…

I’ll call Infosys out. I’ve worked with people from there who literally did not know how to program. They were moved off quickly. There are some solid people there but hard to find in my experience. Akvelon consultants have been consistently better than some FTEs in my experience.

The dirty secret in the industry is that there is a gigantic shortage of devs that can do something or anything. And the clients just don't want to pay the rates that help make that shortage go away. They all want it on the cheap and are spoiled by fancy "SAAS" salesmen that "magically" solve all their problems for "$30-$500" a month, because their SAAS is always the answer.

Literally sitting with a client right now that has gone through at least 5 different CRM systems, each time paying a 3rd party boutique marketing agency to "set it up and migrate it" for them (along with some new ad-campaign software). 3 different attempts at a data warehouse (because they have a gazillion disparate white label and SAAS products in their company with no access to any of the data) and someone told them they need a "Data Warehouse Cluster", when they barely have 20k users. I could rant for hours because the industry is broken.

Oh, and they literally blank stare you in the face as you explain things genuinely with detail and care, and then turn around saying they'll just "consult with their marketing agency" to get their advice. But hey, let's all blame "consulting" companies because they try make something useful using the bottom of the barrel devs. *Not defending Infosys or Accenture and their like, though, fully agreed there.

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

#67

Post by dgb23 »

Swizec wrote: post #34
nebulous_two wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So imposter syndrome is justified sometimes is what you're saying?

To quote a meme: “You all can’t have impostor syndrome, some of you gotta just be bad at your jobs”

I like this quote.

While I think impostor syndrome is real, I also can't believe that so many actually have it (judging from media mostly). I cannot personally relate either. I can relate with insecurity, anxiety and so on _very_ much. But much of that has been based on a lack of experience, practice and knowledge. When those things can heal "impostor syndrome" then it's not impostor syndrome - you'd still have it.

There is also a thing that comes up after more experience rather than less: "nobody has a clue what they're doing"-syndrome.

The idea or realization that real competence or knowledge is a fad in the first place. Everyone just tries really hard to figure stuff out, but nobody _really_ achieves that. There's confidence, good communication and so on, but those things are orthogonal to what I'm describing. And I include very smart and capable people here. In the end it's all based on a "wishy-washy, good enough, it works so far, those are my assumptions" kind of deal.

Not everything is impostor syndrome. Much of it is some version of any of the above, or just plain humbleness.

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

#68

Post by alan-hn »

selestify wrote: post #64
gambiting wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how HN sometimes behaves as if the entire world is one or two small corners of the US.

If you graduate from any top 10 school in the US — which plenty of people do — it is indeed a pretty typical offer Love how I’m downvoted for pointing out a fact. I mean, for fuck’s sake, look at levels.fyi. And look at how many people FAANG and FAANG-adjacent startups hire every year. It’s really not that rare. But hey, stay in denial.

In what fields?

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

#69

Post by Fiahil »

druadh wrote: post #41

Not senior, but junior... I recently started Web Development (well, it's been almost a year now). I am technically in a 'Junior' position, but I've read articles stating that it's only detrimental to list yourself as a Junior. What are your thoughts? Am I still a Junior after a year? Should I keep the "Junior" label on my resume/linkedin if I'm still a Junior?

A first job is always a "Junior" one, whether the title says it or not.

In my current company, you're in a junior position until five years of experience or two years of tenure. So, of course you're still a "junior" after a single year.

Big titles and fast promotions are potential red flags, avoid inflating your current position. It's like saying "I'm super strong with a perfect GPA" in a interview, well lol, you're going to get wrecked.

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

#70

Post by simmanian »

kodah wrote: post #57

> While I certainly don't approve of these practices, I'm also not saying that these companies are only evil. I view that they serve a very strong need in some corners of the system, like a coding bootcamp for the less fortunate. Absolutely not. I was in college for CS/CE, dropped out during an economic crisis, joined the military, and had to work my way through technician, network engineer, systems engineer, DevOps,…

Thank you for sharing and I think your opinion is certainly valid and it would create more trust if everyone shares your principles. I was just trying to convey this idea that they are there because they serve a need. If we want to imagine a world without these practices, we should probably start by tackling the system itself, not by attacking the surface level actors only.
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