Comment by austin-cheney 17 hours ago
There are two problems here.
1. The industry cannot define the terms junior or senior.
2. Most seniors today are the prior generation’s juniors with almost no increase of capabilities, just more years on a resume.
The article asks about what happens when today’s seniors retire in the future. I would argue we are at that critical juncture now.
It’s not that people from 10, 15, 20 years ago were smarter. It’s that they were expected to do more. The business goal, even then, was not higher quality output but was commoditization of hiring/firing and this has been fulfilled more efficiently over time. Title inflation is often the result of retention, which is another aspect of hiring/firing.
Hmm, I agree and disagree. Seniors were expected to take more responsibility, but they worked on smaller code bases. I agree the demansa have changed to meet the codebase and scale, though.
As an example, I'm sure the first Unreal Engine was made by a crew in their garage, in times where they were trailblazing techniques we take for granted 30 years later. That isn't something most modern seniors could do, but the engine could also reasonably be contained in one or two minds in its entirety.
But by UE5 you have teams that maintain every module of the engine. Millions upon millions of lines of code, hundreds of modules, dozens of features per module. It's a completely different beast. No one maintain all of that by themselves.
Maybe thars a part of what makes me want to go indie as an end goal. I want some semblance of the kinds of "responsibility" that involves a full product to ship, not just a portion of a module to maintain. Something somewhat close to what "old seniors" would do (even if I'm not coding every line of the engine like they would do).
Is that a monetary future unfulfilled, or something else?
>Most seniors today are the prior generation’s juniors with almost no increase of capabilities
I highly doubt throwing even a 3YOE "senior" of 2012 at a modern junior interview would turn out as well as you'd expect. the standards have gotten sky high. That doesn't mean they can't do the job, it means the industry created more hoops to jump through.
I agree to an extent with title inflation (and where the hell is the mid level?), but I don't think peple are confusing "juniors" here. It's new grads to at best 2 years of experience. not much controversy there. I also don' think the idea that the 2014 graduating CS class is smarter than the 2024 class would pass the sniff test.