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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, except for perhaps to a staff engineer. Or a senior staff engineer. Or a principal engineer. Or maybe a senior staff principal engineer? The VP of Engineering? The CTO?
a vendor
Earlier quoted context omitted.
a vendor
Vendor is a trump card in this game. Surely no one can do better than a vendor, from which we buy a solution! Best of all, we can then shift the blame too! Our customers cannot use our product? It is the vendor's fault!
I hope one day we all can realise that all of the pontification about the defining qualities of a 'senior' engineer, or the height at which the bar should be set, whether the bar has slowly been lowered over time, etc is all pointless. Senior or not senior is a lens useful only to HR and insecure engineers.
I hope one day we all can realise that all of the pontification about the defining qualities of a 'senior' engineer, or the height at which the bar should be set, whether the bar has slowly been lowered over time, etc is all pointless. Senior or not senior is a lens useful only to HR and insecure engineers.
You'd be surprised at how it's a great developer of latent narcissistic behavior. I know a couple of solid developers who immediate turned into outright jerks on promotion to senior.
I hope one day we all can realise that all of the pontification about the defining qualities of a 'senior' engineer, or the height at which the bar should be set, whether the bar has slowly been lowered over time, etc is all pointless. Senior or not senior is a lens useful only to HR and insecure engineers.
Notch wrote Minecraft when he was around 30. He didn't have 15 years experience in professional engineering and it seems to me he mostly just mucked around writing games in his professional life. He's now recognised as creating more than a billion dollars in value.
Is a "senior" engineer doing better than that at creating software? Did he ever make senior? Does he exhibit all the traits of a senior engineer in the article like not having an ego? This is a profound challenge to the entire industry. The title really is just for HR, a developed ability to choose what projects should be worked on is much more important and there is a big gap between a Senior Software Engineer and someone who actually writes great software.
> The tl;dr on trade-offs is that everyone cuts corners, in every project. Immature engineers discover them in hindsight, disgusted. Mature engineers spell them out at the onset of a project, accept them and recognize them as part of good engineering. And if you are that "mature" engineer, you need to remember and realize that many relatively junior engineers and non-engineer stakeholders won't always understand why…
Implementation details of the process changes from context to context but clear communication is needed in all workplaces, making the implicit explicit.
I hope one day we all can realise that all of the pontification about the defining qualities of a 'senior' engineer, or the height at which the bar should be set, whether the bar has slowly been lowered over time, etc is all pointless. Senior or not senior is a lens useful only to HR and insecure engineers.
The problem with any internal definition of "senior" is that it's misaligned with the market. If you pay someone less than their market value, they're likely to leave for a place that appreciates them more. If you pay someone above their market value, you're basically putting golden hand cuffs on them. I'm not saying I never did those things, but I did have almost exclusively bad experiences with both of these situations. And I've hired something like 200 developers in my CTO roles.
If I have a senior whose salary I'm reluctant to raise, I wonder about three things: Do they actually have enough experience to be in that bracket? Is that person perhaps just not a good fit for what we need? Do I perhaps have too high expectations in seniors that made me inflate their salaries?
If I have a junior whose salary I want to raise, I think about similar questions, but I also wonder if that person perhaps went above and beyond and a bonus is more fitting than a permanent raise.
Sounds a bit cold and rigid, and of course there's exceptions to any rule, but this guiding principle has served me best over the years.
Creating my own, literally made up and company specific, job description for a senior has pretty universally back fired. My company isn't a special snowflake that gets to invent their own job market. It's much more reasonable to connect to the actual job market.
As for titles, I usually didn't put "junior" or "senior" in them at all as far as I could get away with it. For the most part, my seniors were fine, many even happy, with this.
Anyway, I have my own definition and it's "a person who realized that they've already forgotten stuff they used to know by heart in their junior years and approach every problem with appropriate humility stemming from said realization".
My "knowledge window" is, as I discovered, 9 years the skill that I've lost which established this was the ability to write an SQL statement - even a simple one.
I hope one day we all can realise that all of the pontification about the defining qualities of a 'senior' engineer, or the height at which the bar should be set, whether the bar has slowly been lowered over time, etc is all pointless. Senior or not senior is a lens useful only to HR and insecure engineers.
You'd be surprised at how it's a great developer of latent narcissistic behavior. I know a couple of solid developers who immediate turned into outright jerks on promotion to senior.
I know a guy who became significantly more short-fused and less friendly when he was promoted into management. I don't think he liked management work, particularly when it involved both that and fulfilling outstanding responsibilities as an IC because he was the sole SME for a variety of different products/systems we had. There were many sad-sounding conversations with his then-girlfriend well after close of business.
Point being, sometimes people who turn into jerks when promoted are not necessarily narcissists, they just have a shitton more work to deal with now and/or are out of their element and/or can't get home to spend enough time with their SO/kids/pets to fully psychologically reset at the end of the day. I don't know how that description tracks with the devs you knew, though.