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I caught the car

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Re: I caught the car

#31

Post by [deleted] »

keybored wrote: post #20
wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #12

Who cares about titles? It's a really bad signal when a software developer cares about their title. All that matters is are you good at the work.

Junior programmers are the idiot foil of all anecdotes on HN in the last three years. Only juniors do that; everything went fine until the junior...; anyway, the junior sent me a eight thousand diff of obvious slop; so now I got my first gray hairs, thanks Jane Junior; juniors writing naive, clearly quadratic code.[1] Naturally these are the least skilled of your colleagues so that part is a given. But almost all ane…

[deleted]

Re: I caught the car

#32

Post by tyleo »

I hit principal pretty early on in my career. I keep a detailed work history for anyone interested in what that journey is like: https://www.tyleo.com/professional-work-history

It's both hustle and luck. One reason I left Microsoft was because I wasn't on track there. The organization was good but also top heavy so there wasn't room for growth. When I joined Rec Room the tech I built really clicked and the company scaled rapidly. Our team became critical and helped hundreds of coworkers advance their goals. I've heard another principal engineer describe this as, "being pulled into the white hot burning center of a company".

As far as I can tell there's no "trick" to hitting the role. I'd describe it more as, "repeatedly move mountains". There's some luck identifying the right mountains and luck + hustle moving them at all.

Re: I caught the car

#33

Post by SauntSolaire »

iwontberude wrote: post #13
wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #12

Who cares about titles? It's a really bad signal when a software developer cares about their title. All that matters is are you good at the work.

When you work for a company like Google, that title change determines whether or not you are taken seriously. People that get stuck at the same level are often pushed out of teams with performance improvement plans. They expect you to strive for promotion and the culture in these places is reinforcing this progression. It's mostly theater but the outcomes for people's pay is very real, thus the focus on title.

> People that get stuck at the same level are often pushed out of teams with performance improvement plans.

Only if you get stuck at the entry level. L5, is considered terminal and no one will push you out for not going for L6.

(Google also recently 'declared' L4 a terminal position — likely so they could be stingier with L5 promotions — but what your manager considers terminal is what matters most)

Re: I caught the car

#35

Post by Loughla »

tyleo wrote: post #32

I hit principal pretty early on in my career. I keep a detailed work history for anyone interested in what that journey is like: https://www.tyleo.com/professional-work-history It's both hustle and luck. One reason I left Microsoft was because I wasn't on track there. The organization was good but also top heavy so there wasn't room for growth. When I joined Rec Room the tech I built really clicked and the company sc…

I like the insight of luck combined with incredible talent. Too many people get a bad taste in their mouth by leaders who only attribute success to hard work and dedication. Knowing what battles to really fight and die for is a talent in and of itself, but it's also a bit of luck to both have access to systems to allow you to impact important projects and also to end up impacting the right ones.

It's very frustrating to be able to have a massive impact, but not get any sort of notice for it. Many people just start punching a clock when that happens. I've done it.

Re: I caught the car

#36

Post by Neywiny »

Swizec wrote: post #21
Neywiny wrote: post #5

Do we have thoughts on how important "senior"/"staff" is vs bullet points on resumes and the years of service?

> Do we have thoughts on how important "senior"/"staff" is vs bullet points on resumes and the years of service? As a hiring manager, I only read the bullet points. I’ve interviewed startup CTOs who were mid-level engineers at best and “Software Engineer” vanilla titled engineers who have shipped and owned impressive things over years. The scale, complexity, and variety of the systems you’ve built, shipped, owned, an…

Interesting. Not looking to switch roles at present but what do you make of these two projects? One done basically over a weekend, one done over many weekends

Removed a bunch of bad code and got a 1/3rd speed up

https://github.com/mhostetter/gr-adsb/pull/69

Added a new chip to qemu along with some significant peripherals. Never finished it but I did boot Linux on it I think with the upstream device tree.

https://github.com/Neywiny/qemu/tree/h745

Re: I caught the car

#37

Post by theteapot »

Congratulations. It made me remember how proud I was when I became a Senior, and then earned my Super Engineer shortly after. Just recently I've earned my Extreme Engineer title. Good luck on your journey.

Re: I caught the car

#39

Post by ookblah »

i was "cto" at 26 (lol). point being outside of securing a better pay package and using it for job networking purposes your "title" is largely irrelevant as a measure against yourself. don't rely too much on some company handing you a title to determine how skilled you are.

Re: I caught the car

#40

Post by Esophagus4 »

maccard wrote: post #28

> I started my first software job out of college in July of 2023. In January 2026, two and a half years later, I secured my second promotion, earning the title of Senior Software Engineer. > certainly there are hard lessons that I have yet to learn in my career - but my company does not hand that title out like candy > had (and still have) an excellent mentor he had just been promoted to Senior SE. He was two years o…

I interviewed with a company that said that.

They promoted an engineer 18 months out of undergrad to senior. They said it to indicate growth potential at the company, but I saw it as a big red flag.

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