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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

#281

Post by lovich »

selestify wrote: post #248
lovich wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 years in is explicitly not new grad. New grads are new grads.

Sure, if you want to get specifically technical about it. The overall gist of what the OP was talking about is still true. At most, you could say they’re slightly exaggerating, and should reword to “It’s not at all unusual for new college grads to make $250k a year.”

I don’t think it’s overly specific. New grads out of college are a mostly unknown value that is measured using proxies like GPA and pedigree. After 2 years of employment you’ve shown what value you can bring or have been removed from the employer.

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

#282

Post by jghn »

metacritic12 wrote: post #172
robbyking wrote: post #40

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...

IMO it's always fine to be creative when listing a past job title, PROVIDED you are trying to provide more accurate information and not deceive. I've had titles that do not at all accurately reflect my day to day, so I list them as something more topical. However I will never portray myself as having more authority nor more day-to-day experience than my title would have otherwise conveyed.

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

#283

Post by ceras »

rsynnott wrote: post #200
ska wrote: 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...

Also, oddly, banks, where everyone seems to be a VP at the very least.

Thing is, within the banking industry, these end up being fairly standardized titles. Titles mean less across industries, but within an industry, there's some consistency. In fact in banking, these are more standardized than tech industry titles are.

Typically at banks, the ranks are: analyst, associate, VP, managing director. Everyone eventually gets to VP, so it's not a particularly high level. It's similar to how tech companies have a level everyone is supposed to reach (often "Senior"). So, analyst is an entry-level role, associate is a mid-level role (2yrs experience, or a higher degree), and VP is a terminal role. VP is a wide band, though, so there's often sub-levels within that (whether publicly visible or not): managing director is a very high title at a bank.

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

#284

Post by sys_64738 »

robbyking wrote: post #40
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…

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.

The is especially prevalent on Wall St where the major banks have VPs car Ming out of their ears. They’re the equivalent of senior managers elsewhere.

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

#285

Post by kayodelycaon »

quesera wrote: post #260
kayodelycaon wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on what kind of developer you're looking for. In the web applications I've worked on, knowledge of application architecture and experience with linux trumps anything I learned in a college course. Based on my experience, theory problems on white boards is about as useful as dropping a CUPs automation problem on unsuspecting interviewees. Build me a CUPs driver that drops pdf into in folder in 15 min…

I'm confused by your juxtaposition of declared familiarity to nonstandard capitalization of CUPS.

Because it’s been two months since I’ve worked with it and I’m absolutely terrible at spelling.

I capitalized it three different ways as I wrote it and picked the one that looked correct. :)

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

#286

Post by munificent »

kjgkjhfkjf wrote: post #257
munificent wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is literally part of the game unfortunately I strongly disagree with this framing. There is no "game". There are just the actions of the individual players. Yes, in some sense, lying is part of the "game" in that some players will do it. But extending that to saying "it's part of the game" implies that all players must use those moves, which is absolutely false. It also implies that you are morally excused from doi…

Feel free not to engage in this practice if it offends your moral sensibilities, but you will be at a disadvantage if you do. Experienced resume readers are aware of the amount of self-aggrandizement that goes on, and your modest and truthful claims would be subject to the same amount of skepticism as everyone else's.

> Feel free not to engage in this practice if it offends your moral sensibilities, but you will be at a disadvantage if you do.

I think one could argue that all moral sensibilities exist to place one at an individual short term disadvantage in return for potentially better longer term or community level outcomes. We don't need moral codes to get us to be immediately self-serving—our natural self interest takes care of that. It's like the old joke that if there was a shortcut that always worked, it wouldn't be called a "shortcut", it would just be The Way.

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

#287

Post by seanmcdirmid »

gambiting wrote: post #95
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is highly likely that the former vice president of a startup is actually from one of those two small corners of the US (given that these also seem to be hot startup scenes), so it isn't a weird assumption for senior roles (not new grad ones). It isn't mentioned if she is a SWE or not, however, which would make a huge difference.

I don't know, I think saying that it's "typical" to be paid 250k as a graduate is pretty damn weird.

Yes, but unfortunately it is sounding less and less ridiculous as inflation picks up.

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

#288

Post by Hermitian909 »

shadowfox wrote: post #203
shard wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought General Counsel means you have a JD?

You generally need that and typically reasonable experience wrangling different legal matters at scale. I guess Musk was just being Musk.

You'd need to be licensed to perform the various legal duties one expects of general counsel, but general counsel is not a protected title and thus anyone within the company could be given the title. Musk is right on this one.

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

#289

Post by HideousKojima »

shard wrote: post #189
camhart wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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/…

I thought General Counsel means you have a JD?

What Musk is saying is that from a legal perspective, there are only three job titles/roles that must be filled in a corporation. Beyond that, they could literally have titles like "Grand Chief Space Wizard" and "Cheesy Toast" for various jobs and roles. They could call the role of General Counsel "Asshole in a Suit."

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

#290

Post by nsonha »

valbaca wrote: post #218
robbyking wrote: post #40

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.

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 th…

more naive to even badmouth your manager in an interview. She could be in the right but that's a very risky move.
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