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We don't have senior engineers anymore

sibelius.substack.com

11–20 of 127 posts

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#13

Wait till they end up as staff or principal. Along with bad management they hollow out several hundred person orgs.

all titles except for the ones indicating executive or direct reports are meaningless.

It is a game, where workers strife to be granted higher and higher titles, just because their peers and the industry does.

There is no inherit requirements, I can start a company today and call everyone super duper staff engineer

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#14
If there ever used to be "Senior Engineers", I wonder if it was because before there were so many fewer engineers and those who were engineers were the folks who were most interested in computers. Nowadays the field is lucrative and people do it for money, so the average dev is lower quality. Kind of like an eternal September situation.

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#16

turns out there's no philosophy of engineering! IMO, this is also why we have "computer science"... as if computers were found in nature and we were trying to 'reverse engineer' how they are made; which is ridiculous! engineering, technology, computers, are not well covered by neither philosophy of arts nor sciences; if anything math's philosophy gets closer; but it's just a branch of phil. of science.

You are being extremely anglo-centric.

In Northern and Central European countries, it is call datalogic or informatics. Your analogy holds only when you tell it in English.

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#17
I don't think it's possible for a packer to become a mapper. We're talking about a strategy (being a packer) with some deep seated emotional roots. They have probably been at it since age 3. Rather than trying to turn them into a mapper, better to find what they are actually good at.

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#19

Wait till they end up as staff or principal. Along with bad management they hollow out several hundred person orgs.

all titles except for the ones indicating executive or direct reports are meaningless. It is a game, where workers strife to be granted higher and higher titles, just because their peers and the industry does. There is no inherit requirements, I can start a company today and call everyone super duper staff engineer

"Distinguished Senior Staff Engineer"

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#20
post #6

You can be a junior developer with 15 years of experience, but it's quite hard to hear.

Tell that to my previous employer. There, software engineers turned "senior" after 2 years. Then principal after 3 more. It was a scheduled activity to "upgrade". Only X people could turn senior every year because the title changed triggered a salary raise and they could only afford that for X people. I left when I got approval to hire 3 senior software engineers to my team but the salary level was only attractive to the people with zero experience, if that.
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