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.
> 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
That's bizarre given Wall Street has been abusing the Vice President title for generations now. (VPs at American banks report to Managing Directors, a middle-management level of which there are hundreds if not thousands. It's the tier above Associate, i.e. straight out of B school or with a year or two of Analyst experience.)
"It's interesting, these titles," Musk said. "You know that there's actually only three titles that actually mean anything for a corporation? It's president, secretary, and treasurer. And technically they can be the same person. And all these other titles are just basically made up. So CEO is a made-up title, CFO is a made-up title. General counsel, a made-up title. They don't mean anything." https://www.youtube.com/…
> 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...
Also, oddly, banks, where everyone seems to be a VP at the very least.
When I worked for a bank it was explained to me that early on foreign banks and financial institutions would not take a call from someone other than a VP, so they made all the bankers VP's to get work done. That was probably an over simplification.
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.
> 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...
Titles are not standardized. Some companies a "member of technical staff" is a starting position and in others its the highest engineering position.
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.
>>If you graduate from any top 10 school in the US — which plenty of people do Yes, and globally that's still nothing. You are talking about the elite of the elite, chosen ones among the chosen ones. In other 1st world countries, and even in majority of USA no, recent graduates are not paid quarter of a million dollars. There's a select, very exclusive, very limited group of people who do. But like others have pointe…
I wasn't aware that "elite of the elite" included many public schools that aren't even that difficult to get into. If you're a California resident UCSD, UCI, UCB, UCLA, UCSB are all accessible schools that give you a very solid shot at a FAANG job out of college. If you're a Michigan resident, same goes for UMich. Illinois, UIUC. Georgia, Georgia Tech. Texas, any number of great state schools. These schools are not that difficult to get into. They're also public, so there is no legacy shenanigans happening to boost wealthy applicants.
If you grew up in a shitty high school, you can go to a community college and then transfer to one of these state schools. I know for certain California has excellent policies that favor CC applicants transferring in. There are multiple ways in the door if you apply yourself.
Perhaps consider that a student that can't even get into a state school has no business or ability to write code at a level that would merit a 250k salary. The bar is on the floor.
Exactly my point, folks with privilege like yourself don't even understand what privilege they have and have taken advantage of their whole life. I did (apply myself). I did work my ass off to get into, and out of, (good) engineering school and pay for it also. It simply wasn't an option for me to go to an expensive private or out of state school with a price tag of a couple hundred thousand dollars. So I went to the…
Please stop using that word. It sucks the life from you because you think it excuses you from self analyzing why you aren't happy where you are. Life is not fair if you are a human, cat, squirrel or mouse. We are born into a specific set of conditions...look around and move but please stop using the word privilege. Everyone and everything is different.
I am very happy where I am. Within myself, I am not blaming anything for lack of anything but rather celebrate my successes and what has come from my hard work.
That doesn't mean I can't recognize that folks are different, and that where we start out most definitely has an impact on how far we go.
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.
This is hilarious because I recently had a junior dev come to me to discuss issues they were having with their (incompetent) software manager.
She said "I don't understand why he doesn't understand the technical aspects. It must be me...I must be bad at communicating because [the manager] was a CTO at a startup!"
I literally laughed out loud. Her communication skills were fantastic, but she was so new and naive to think that titles from a startup have literally any worth.
Sometimes it means “someone who can bill $300 an hour” with no relation to actual ability. I was a “senior” three years out of college and I had no clue what in the world I was doing. Come to think of it after 20 years I kinda still feel that way.
I have demonstrated my ability to convince clients to pay amounts of money like this for my skills. And yes, the not-so-secret thing about consulting is that if you're able to convince a client that you're worth $500 an hour, it's just easy to convince them to pay $300 an hour for the work of a colleague of yours they've never seen.
Ugh, I encountered this a few times early in my career (early 2000s.) The worst case was a team from a large, expensive, high-end consulting company. There was one A player who was fast and sharp and absolutely invaluable, two developers who were slow but diligent, one guy who everybody avoided because he was pissed off that he wasn't as smart as the A player, and one engineer who spent all day in front of an IDE but never checked in any code. Once, as a prank, a couple of my coworkers sent me over to "help" this last person (to be clear, the prank was on both me and the person I was sent to help.) They were staring at code that was just syntactically wrong, and not in a subtle way. It was a Java source file, and the line that they were working on, which I think was the only line they had changed, did not look like Java. They couldn't see what was wrong with it, and honestly neither could I, in the sense that I could only see that it didn't look like Java. This person had been "working" on the project for several weeks, and from that point on, I felt intensely sorry them, because they came to work every day for eight hours, and sat in a chair looking at an IDE, going to meetings, staying late if the A player stayed late, etc., nobody ever talking to them, and I can't imagine what kind of bizarre hell that was for them. I didn't feel comfortable talking to them about it because there was an age and culture and language gap, so I'll never know. When the consulting' contract was up, we renewed, but that person was replaced with another slow but diligent worker, and I never saw them again.