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How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

blog.kuperate.com

171–180 of 332 posts

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

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Senior Engineer' is just a pay grade. I'm sorry, maybe the world should be a saner place, but that's how it is.

And it often just means: most senior person working on this project or for this company. Even if that's 1 or 2 years of experience.

It could be that meaningful, but sometimes it's not.

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

#172
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…

On a related note, I dated a woman who was promoted to vice president of a small start up when she was in her 20's. She had to hide her title on her resume when she left because no established firm wanted to hire someone whom they assumed they'd need to pay a quarter million dollars to be competitive. Sometimes grandiose titles can work against you.

Could you just downgrade yourself without the company's consent? A upgrade seems fraudulent, but a downgrade...

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

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you graduate from any top 10 school in the US — which plenty of people do Since when does "typical" mean "graduated from a top 10 school"? That's why you're being downvoted.

Because those schools collectively admit tens of thousands of students every year. It’s not that rare.

I thought it was over a million?

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

#174

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.

It depends on the company. In my company (100,000 employees, but in IT less than 3,000) "senior" can be a college student, even "senior manager" can be a 22 year old college student, while "director" is the lowest level manager (with people reporting). They changed the titles recently saying "we have to align to the market", but it was to compensate the low salaries with high, meaningless titles.

For example a colleague was hired as an electrical engineer in a manufacturing plant in Germany. Because she did not speak German well enough (she is an immigrant), they gave her the position of plant IT manager with "senior manager" title. She is not even an IT person, just graduated college in EE, she does not know to write a line a code if her life depends on it. But hey, she is a senior! that is the point of the article.

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

#175
post #91
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…

As someone who has hired a new grad into a “Senior Engineer” role, it meant the title of the salary band that met the candidate’s salary requirements to make our offer competitive with the other offers he received. We wanted to hire a junior role since our team was already relatively senior. But the company’s salary bands were not at all competitive for entry-level developers. So we classed the new hire as senior to…

I worked at a company where there were lots of managers, directors, and coordinators. And just as many people under them. When I reached the top of my band I had to hire someone. Not because there was more work that needed to be delegated but because I had to move up to the next title "manager" and needed at least 1 person to manage.

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

#176
A hiring manager friend at a Seattle unicorn once asked me to look over resumes. I didn't have a full grasp of how prevalent these "consultancies" are and was puzzled by all the jargon-filled, similar-looking resumes from people who were clearly working for "consultancies". Now I know, they were all looking for a ramp off! Some (many?) may even make great hires, but it' s hard to tease them out by looking at those resumes.

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

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a related note, I dated a woman who was promoted to vice president of a small start up when she was in her 20's. She had to hide her title on her resume when she left because no established firm wanted to hire someone whom they assumed they'd need to pay a quarter million dollars to be competitive. Sometimes grandiose titles can work against you.

Could you just downgrade yourself without the company's consent? A upgrade seems fraudulent, but a downgrade...

At Apple, they do that for you when you leave!

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

#178
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes grandiose titles can work against you. Early stage startups can be especially hilarious that way, especially when young founders/early stage employees mistakenly feel they need a "big" title to be taken seriously...

Yep, indeed. I'm technically the CTO of the startup I'm helping to found. And even though I'm 37, I haven't been in tech long enough to feel like I've earned that title, so my LinkedIn says Chief Software Architect (I made it up).

The funny thing is that I might assume a CEO/CTO at a small startup has less experience than a "Chief Software Architect." My assumption would be that the executives are founders and that there's not a minimum experience requirement for founders.

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

#179
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes grandiose titles can work against you. Early stage startups can be especially hilarious that way, especially when young founders/early stage employees mistakenly feel they need a "big" title to be taken seriously...

Yep, indeed. I'm technically the CTO of the startup I'm helping to found. And even though I'm 37, I haven't been in tech long enough to feel like I've earned that title, so my LinkedIn says Chief Software Architect (I made it up).

[deleted]

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

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you just downgrade yourself without the company's consent? A upgrade seems fraudulent, but a downgrade...

At Apple, they do that for you when you leave!

Can you explain what this means?
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