What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad

In many hard sciences, 6 years is graduate school.

And a PhD would be senior to a graduate?

Also the quote is 'professional', so although it's probably not the case, it doesn't preclude spending your 6 years in 'graduate school' beforehand anyway.

For software developers, I've thought 5 years of solid work and continuous learning is about the right time horizon for a senior title, in a typical contemporary software/internet company. (At least, 5 years of seeing the lifecycle through awhile -- not job-hopping repeatedly, before getting to see cause and effect together.)

I could even see that going faster than 5 years, especially in a startup. For example, say one of your early hires is fresh out of school, but really curious and learning fast, already did some open source, learns from mentoring/osmosis, takes easily to a team sensibility, and has to tackle a lot of things like is the norm in a startup. Within a couple years, as the startup is starting to think about titles more, they might be a battle-scarred veteran with firsthand experience and maturity beyond their years. (Or, even if not everything is yet the complete senior package -- such as maybe they've only worked on one system and team, and could've overlearned from limited data points -- you want to acknowledge the value of their contributions, as well as their institutional memory and cultural role. So maybe help them level up any aspect they haven't yet had a chance to.)

(BTW, I avoid the term "professional engineer" when talking about software, because I've heard it have special meaning in the more regulated, traditional engineering disciplines.)

I absolutely cannot agree with this.

It's true that after five years in a startup, you'll have seen lots of systems. But being a senior practitioner requires deep experience as well as breadth, and enough time in the industry to recognise larger trends.

There is no magic mark for this, and it's quite possible to reach ten years and still be a weak practitioner, because you were exposed to a narrow range of problems and were never around to see your bad decisions bear bad fruit.

However, the opposite does not hold. It doesn't matter how intelligent you are, you can't short circuit repeated experience and the mix of breadth and depth required. People want to. I wanted to. But I didn't: all I became was an overbearing mid who had the rhetoric (and the OSS contributions!) to convince others I knew what I was doing. There is absolutely no comparison between myself in 2017 and myself in 2022, but we both have a job title of "Senior Engineer".

In fact, I think that in the long term the trend is for the senior bar to get _higher_. This is pushed by two things: firstly, that the technical domain gets harder, software becomes more abstract, our expectation of engineers increases particularly in "left shifted" environments where every IC must do everything from frontend to microservices to infra to security to testing.

The second force is demographic: as IC salaries have increased, there has been less pressure for senior engineers to exit in favour of the management track. That means more experienced engineers on average. Industry needs a way to describe these practitioners, beyond "very senior", and overall the range of skills of ICs will widen. Under those conditions the definition of senior engineer gets more exclusive, not less.

No content with Javascript disabled. Hardly unheard of among a technical audience.