Is Senior the new Junior?
Posted by interrupt_hdlr@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 16 comments
Got told today that senior is someone that can work under guidance, staff is someone who can work on thanks unsupervised, and principal can take on projects. Does that match your understanding?
xaervagon@reddit
Titles have never meant anything in this industry.
ttkciar@reddit
They seemed to in the 1980s and 1990s, but the industry went insane pretty quickly after that.
dweezil22@reddit
It's not just tech, in banking and insurance the shift manager for the janitorial staff has "Vice President" in his title. Took me a while to learn that the person with JUST "Vice President" in their title was the one that actually had power, everyone else was basically a manager.
SpiderHack@reddit
Junior and senior do have meanings, they vary, but much less than "basically everything above senior"
Napolean_BonerFarte@reddit
Is CTO the new Intern?
SnugglyCoderGuy@reddit
Freshman in college taking CS101
skidmark_zuckerberg@reddit
No?
Juniors need help, guidance and mentorship.
Mid level typically needs very little guidance but needs mostly planned out tickets.
Seniors do the requirements gathering, delegation if needed, mentoring, and also the work. Seniors also identify problems and either fix them or get them on the docket and can take a project or feature from zero to delivered. They are more team level though.
Staff typically focuses on architectural leadership and delivery across teams or across say a single department.
Principal usually focuses on macro level company goals and defines the long term. They’d focus on how every team and department fits together architecturally and ensure everything is moving towards those company wide goals.
Early_Rooster7579@reddit
Depends on the size of the org
SplendidPunkinButter@reddit
In my experience, setting up the environment and writing the code are separate skills, and very few people are good at both of these things. The industry knows these are different skill sets, which is why they tried to combine them by inventing “DevOps”. Dev and ops are two different things.
mq2thez@reddit
No, that’s wildly incorrect.
A senior engineer should be able to lead an entire team. Should be able to break down complex work and lead projects with multiple engineers so that everyone can keep moving. Should have significant technical expertise.
A staff engineer should be able to do all of that, but across 3-4 teams. As they get more experienced, this is the kind of person guiding major multi-org efforts. Someone who can pick strategy and projects for a year in advance. A staff engineer assigned to a single team is being wasted.
Principal engineers see the gaps, and know how to point the entire company at them. They work on the things that completely change how your whole company operates, the new capabilities that never existed or needed to drastically change. They see the patterns and skate way, way far ahead of where the puck is at. They guide roadmaps at a very high level, and usually advise the CTO.
DeterminedQuokka@reddit
It just varies by company.
AbstractLogic@reddit
Its title creep and yes. Senior used to be the top before a tech lead. But then there wasn’t any new paychecks past that level so we had to invent new levels lol
sleepyj910@reddit
I've never heard the term 'staff' in this field before lol
ttkciar@reddit
Job titles have just gotten ridiculous and meaningless.
I insisted to my boss that my title should simply be "Software Engineer", and that worked well enough, didn't prevent them from putting other engineers under my mentorship or giving me new projects to spec out and bring up.
The people who matter will know what you're capable of, and give you responsibilities and freedoms to match. The title doesn't even make a difference.
high_throughput@reddit
No
RGBrewskies@reddit
lol