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I caught the car

undecidability.net

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Re: I caught the car

#61

Post by ehnto »

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.

I don't typically care about title, but it does matter a bit when you are talking to others outside your company (or even inside of its big enough)

I recall giving talks where I was principal on important projects, but my title didn't reflect that so during chats after the presentation I had people ask who I was and I didn't really feel satisfied with the answer I was giving. I could tell I was being undersold just by my title. Is that their mistake? Kinda, but they're acting on the info they had available and to their read, I was not principal so someone else must have been the one who architected the project.

Of course those clued in, other devs or experienced management could tell by the talk that I lead the technical side. As much as I love just building stuff, getting my career dues would be nice.

Re: I caught the car

#62

Post by sokoloff »

m463 wrote: post #43
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 remember discovering a long time ago there were lots of VPs at yahoo.

Same in financial services. I became a VP at 28 or 29 and we had Assistant VPs in their early 20s in tech.

Re: I caught the car

#63

Post by menno-sh »

holden_nelson wrote: post #59

Author here. I just started blogging this year. Been really interesting to see a post get some traction and read everyone's responses. Thank you all for reading. I left out a detail that might be relevant? Maybe not? I couldn't decide. SWE is actually a second career for me. I flunked out of college when I was 19, spent most of my 20s working as a chef, and then graduated college and started this job at 29. So I'm 31…

> I'd already been programming for like 10 years when I started this job

The first 6-12 months after university are largely about 'learning how to work'. I'd say getting that out of the way is a pretty nice head start.

Re: I caught the car

#64

Post by reflection42 »

Wonderful to see a worked example of self-reflection to help uncover what is personally important in work. As many will know, this kind of reflection is close to one of the pivotal exercises recommended in Richard Bolles valuable book on choosing a career or next career step “What Color is your Parachute“.

Re: I caught the car

#65

Post by BowBun »

boron1006 wrote: post #26
BowBun wrote: post #4

When I meet fellow devs, I ask what projects they've shipped. Roles are near-meaningless across companies and convey 0 information about what their work involves in my experience. I appreciate that OP learned something about the job through this article.

This isn’t foolproof either and plenty of people can talk convincingly about running projects that they had little to nothing to do with.

Totally agreed, I've been 'got' in interviews before. Now I ask follow-ups with specifics. If you were an IC, you should know libraries/architectures that were used. If you were in leadership, you should be able to tell me the story leading up to a project, about the parties involved, and the outcomes.

It takes time to do properly, though. And most of the time I just don't care about evaluating someone's capabilities like that.

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