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We don't have senior engineers anymore

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Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#111

Post by romanhn »

projektfu wrote: post #90
Raed667 wrote: post #7

Reminds me of a friend -who upon graduation- went from intern directly to "CTO" of a web agency. He was their 2nd developer and only engineer.

A one-person housecleaning startup has a CEO if they incorporate. But it says something about a company if their chief is just out of school, and it usually says the company is new and small. It might be the next Facebook, or it could more likely be just another new company with young founders. I've seen CFO-as-a-service but haven't seen that yet for CTO.

It's called fractional CTO and is most definitely a thing.

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#112

Post by drewcoo »

hurril wrote: post #48
boo-ga-ga wrote: post #18

Any article that splits people into two groups and says one group cannot inherently be good at something immediately puts me off, sorry.

I can definitely say that I am a mapper and not a packer. But I can also say that I am pretty much _all_ mapper and no packer. This means that it takes me forever to understand a lot of things that presumed packers (or more balanced individuals) would get in a jiffy. This is not intended as a humble brag! For the longest time on some projects I just don't f**ing get it, I start to feel dumb and in way: out of place.…

For me, it's very much about finding the right level of abstraction. And sometimes things take a lot longer to understand because pieces of the code focus on the wrong abstractions to see how it all fits together. You see that a lot in large orgs with teams with their own coding styles/conventions, focused on their own assigned goals.

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#113

Post by iamflimflam1 »

neon_electro wrote: post #100
iamflimflam1 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone expressed this very well to me. Top tier companies pick up the faang rejects. Middle tier get the top tier rejects. Bottom tier get the rejects from the middle tier. “We get what’s left. Sometimes we get lucky and get someone who’s fallen through the cracks” Personally I’m not a massive fan of the faang recruitment techniques and I think there’s a lot of fantastic senior engineers who want to do interesting w…

Shouldn't it be clear that if you're paying a software engineer $150K, the employer is getting $300-500k in value from their labor?

A BDR who may be instrumental in bringing in multi-million dollar contracts might be paid minimum wage.

There's no obvious correlation between high pay and value delivered.

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#114

Post by tuwtuwtuwtuw »

richbell wrote: post #52
erulabs wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep seeing this (anecdotally) out if the Midwest. Folks with 4 years experience doing mostly front end work who’ve never deployed anything with the title “staff engineer”. I sort of feel bad for them because without a large step down in title they’d never get another job. Perhaps that’s the trick - title inflation to mask bad pay?

That's exactly what it is. Many organizations have strict pay bands and cannot attract talent without overly inflated titles; cue dozens of "directors" with no reports, and people with < 5 years experience being hired as "Staff Engineers" to build web apps.

I'm not really following but want to understand.

How does inflating titles help to attract talent?

Do you mean this: let's say they want to hire a senior software engineer, but the salary for this level would not attract any candidates so instead they try to hire a staff engineer?

Mostly trying to understand if this is middle-managers tricking their higher ups or if it's the company trying to trick the candidates.

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#115

Post by heywhatupboys »

garba_dlm wrote: post #107
heywhatupboys wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

lucky me I'm speaking in English. also, what does informatics have to do with philosophy, andor phil. 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!

"computer science" does not contain the words "computer" in many languages

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#116

Post by heywhatupboys »

dbalatero wrote: post #63
heywhatupboys wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's meaningful insofar as you might want to continue to receive raises etc as your experience level goes up.

But that is absurd! The titles are arbitrarily given

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#117

Post by richbell »

tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote: post #114
richbell wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what it is. Many organizations have strict pay bands and cannot attract talent without overly inflated titles; cue dozens of "directors" with no reports, and people with < 5 years experience being hired as "Staff Engineers" to build web apps.

I'm not really following but want to understand. How does inflating titles help to attract talent? Do you mean this: let's say they want to hire a senior software engineer, but the salary for this level would not attract any candidates so instead they try to hire a staff engineer? Mostly trying to understand if this is middle-managers tricking their higher ups or if it's the company trying to trick the candidates.

It's the former. Larger companies tend to have strict pay bands relative to the seniority and responsibility of a position. Let's say intern>junior>senior>manager>director>vp.

If the salary range for "senior" is 50-70k, this might be attractive for a customer service rep but not for a senior software developer. Thus, you'll need to inflate the title to be either a manager, director, or staff/prinicple (if HR recognizes that) to be authorized to offer market compensation for a senior software developer.

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#118

Post by bee_rider »

protomolecule wrote: post #77
bee_rider wrote: post #45

I don’t really get the first example. > Why do we need variables? > How variables are really stored? > The type of variables matter? These aren’t questions that a junior engineer couldn’t answer. These are questions that somebody who has passed a single programming class ought to be able to answer. Then they have questions about this vite platform, which I’ve never heard of, but it seems like they are asking “does so…

So why do we need variables?

It is a broad question, so here’s a broad answer:

A computer program is a sequence of instructions for the computer to follow, to transform some input into some output. To write useful and interesting programs, it is helpful to have some way of representing quantities which might change depending on those inputs.

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#119

Post by bee_rider »

patrick451 wrote: post #86
bee_rider wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked on a project that had a dedicated architect, they really seemed like they were the only one doing engineering work (design). The rest of us were assembling their design, like technicians do.

If drawing over-simplified block diagrams of software components is "engineering", we'd be better off just letting the technicians follow their intution. My experience with principals engaging in this sort of naval gazing is they just fuck everything up. The project was in much better shape before they came along with their fancy engineering ideas.

IDK, I’m a grad student, so most of my programming does not really need engineering, in the same way that carpenters and machinists don’t generally need mechanical engineers to go over their side projects, sheds, and home-made shop tools.

The architect seemed to have a pretty good path mapped out, but it was early on in the project, and I was just an intern so I wasn’t there long enough to see the mess of reality asserting itself.

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#120

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

philipov wrote: post #4
mytailorisrich wrote: post #2

In all the companies I work for in the last 20 years "senior engineer" effectively meant someone with about 5 years of experience. In general the bar is low, indeed, and the title tends to be quite aggrandizing. The title that shows seniority ("been there, done that"), again in my experience, is the next one, which usually is "principal engineer".

How does that square with the junior job postings that want at least ten years of experience with some technology?

It compares very well: They're both nonsense.
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