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The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

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101–110 of 202 posts

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#101

Post by bluGill »

eru wrote: post #56
gringoDan wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My conclusion after working in tech for a few years: If you don't want to play the politics game, just interview with new companies and get a new role and a significant pay bump every 1-2 years. Sad that the incentives are set up this way.

It's not that sad, at least the churn makes knowledge and best practices bubble through the industry.

Domain knowledge never gets there though. People never really understand their products or the customers. which is bad for products.

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#102

Post by discordance »

ryandrake wrote: post #73
geoffjentry wrote: post #7

The thing that many folks don't understand is that it's not that "Titles don't matter", it's that "Titles don't matter when compared across companies". There's not a universal definition of say, "senior software engineer", so comparing titles across companies will always be an apples/oranges exercise. Titles do matter, but only when in the proper context.

When a big tech (or FAANG) company acquires a smaller company, it very often happens that the smaller company's employees' titles all get adjusted. SmallScrappyCo's CEO becomes the team's Senior Manager. SmallScrappyCo's VP of engineering becomes Regular Engineering Manager. I've worked directly with former Directors who suddenly became "third engineer from the left" after their company was acquired.

hierarchy mapping

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#103

Post by bluGill »

pedrosorio wrote: post #20
rizzaxc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean at the end of the day the title is only to feed your own ego. At family gathering nobody's gonna ask you why you were Principal and now you're Staff. I find no difference between being called a "Director" or a "Manager", because the title alone tells me absolutely nothing Reminds me of American Psycho, where everybody is a damn Vice President (reflective of the time)

> Reminds me of American Psycho, where everybody is a damn Vice President (reflective of the time) Reflective of the industry, really. It’s still that way in banking.

Vice President has legal meaning as a title. Only a vice president or above can make some loans. Since banks make those loans all the time they need a lot of vice presidents to do it. In a small town bank with at most 10 people it makes sense, but for a large banks with branches all over the country you end up with a ton of vice presidents just for that need, but they don't really get any other authority.

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#104

Post by MattGaiser »

DamnYuppie wrote: post #75
MattGaiser wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does one effectively do this self promotion?

Have a list of the projects you worked on with measurable benefits to the company. Start by talking to your manager and then work your way up your reporting structure talking to the directors/cto/ceo's. If they don't know you you need to walk in an introduce yourself, don't drop all your accomplishments on them at once but something I have used many times in the past is just "Hi I am X I work/ed/ing in/on Y, loved he…

I could do all this regularly or send out resumes/answer recruiters every year or two? No wonder tenure is so low.

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#105

Post by mathgladiator »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #47
pcmoney wrote: post #16

“For example, a senior title at Big Tech typically expects more from an engineer than a small developer agency, a non-tech-first company, or a recently founded start-up does” This is simply not true. Seniors at FAANG type companies simply dont do that much. Typically have a narrow specialty and a good grasp on how it fits into the larger Org’s strategy etc. Senior engineers at a small shop do EVERYTHING. Front end, b…

> This is simply not true. Seniors at FAANG type companies simply dont do that much. I don’t know where this myth came from, but it’s not true. Aside from the isolated stories about mismanaged FAANG departments that don’t have many responsibilities, FAANG jobs tend to have high standards and high expectations. FAANG companies don’t pay the highest salaries without expecting high output. The engineers may not be sprea…

The gap emerges because doing everything under is vastly different than doing strategic work across multiple organizations. It's the difference between captaining a small boat versus a super carrier.

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#106

Post by bluGill »

TrackerFF wrote: post #70
lennoff wrote: post #8

I think the key takeaway is to never believe when someone says "Don't worry, you'll get promoted in no time".

I've noticed that unless you live in a city where one can switch jobs in under a week, not have to re-locate, or take a big hit on the commute, companies know (knew? At least pre-COVID and rise of work from home) that they have the upper hand. Even in countries with extremely strong labor laws, companies are not shy to pull every trick in the book to drag out promotions. I've seen examples where it took close to 12 m…

As you get older there is diminishing returns on getting better. There is a big difference between someone fresh out of school and been there for 1 year. Between 1 and 2 years it isn't as big, but still important. Between 10 and 20 years there is very little (at 20 years you should have forgotten something that is no longer useful). By 40 years your mind is probably in decline...

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#108

Post by seattle_spring »

eru wrote: post #65
commandlinefan wrote: post #10

When I see "senior" in front of any job title, I generally ignore it as essentially meaningless (and I've been a "senior" for about 20 years now). Unless a job title and description comes with actual managerial responsibilities (so director, VP, etc.), it doesn't seem to correlate in any way with pay, respect, job security or any real say in priorities.

Even VP doesn't have to mean much. In tech, a VP is a big deal. In finance, everyone is a VP.

At big or established tech companies, yes. At "startups" / passion projects with between 1 and a small handful of people it's almost always a made up inflated title. The amount of resumes I've seen with "CTO / VP of Eng" at some hoaky parking app made in a weekend in enough to raise red flags anytime I see the title.

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#109

Post by eptcyka »

e1g wrote: post #48
azdle wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you me? I spent the last 3 years completely redeveloping the foundation of our platform which will save the company millions of dollars a year. I didn't do it alone or anything. But I started the project, was the only one to work on it full time throughout the whole project, defined the underlying architecture, and implemented most of the lowest layers. I poured all my energy into the project. We launched beginni…

It's a signal from the market ("employer") that what you currently offer is not what they currently value. If you desire greater rewards/ recognition, you need to discover what they value and decide if you want to offer that. Developers expect that work such as "refactoring", "platform architecture", "R&D", "investing into the future" has some intrinsic value to the business. At the company level, work such as "knowl…

I don't believe it's healthy to look at a single employee-employer relationship through the prism of market capitalism. Maybe they just need to get better at defending their work and be clearer to their management about what they expect.

Re: The Seniority Roller Coaster and Down-Leveling in Tech

#110

Post by [deleted] »

nkingsy wrote: post #5

I got down leveled when I moved to big tech. Spent two years completely remaking the product I was tasked to work on, while the two other engineers on my team, both a level above me, cheered me on and didn’t do much. I turned our product from a total waste about to be cancelled into a promising tech with some momentum, but I spent all my time coding instead of writing about coding, and I likely won’t get promoted aga…

[deleted]
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