Comment by oh_my_goodness
Comment by oh_my_goodness 5 days ago
It's just a pay grade. Please folks stop trying to analyze "junior," "senior," and so forth. It's just something management told HR to write down.
Comment by oh_my_goodness 5 days ago
It's just a pay grade. Please folks stop trying to analyze "junior," "senior," and so forth. It's just something management told HR to write down.
As a 51 year old, I hate when other old people think that “back in my day things were different”
> Evans has held his present position with IBM since 1965. Previously, he had been a vice president of the Fed- eral Systems Division with the man- agement responsibility for developing large computing systems; the culmina- tion of this work was the IBM/System 360. He joined IBM in 1951 as a junior engineer and has held a variety of engineering and management posi- tions within the corporation
Dated 1969
https://bitsavers.org/magazines/Computer_Design/Computer_Des...
Next meme that needs to die: “back in my day, developers did it for the love and not the money”
You don’t get to be a senior engineer just because of tenure. It’s not gaming the system to expect a level to be based on the amount of responsibility and not just from getting 1 year of experience 10x.
You want a promotion because you want more money. Even though I have found the difference to not be that great on the enterprise dev side. But in BigTech and adjacent, we are talking about multiple six figures differences as you move up.
I work in consulting and our bill rate is based on our title/level of responsibility. It kills me that some non customer facing consultants want to have a “career track” that doesn’t involve leading projects and strategy and want to stay completely “hands on”.
We can hire people cheaply from outside the country that can do that. There is an IC career track that is equal to a director (manager of managers). But you won’t get there hands on keyboard.
It really only matters on an individual level once you become a manager, and have both juniors and seniors to manage.
It’s way more than a “pay grade” for any company with real leveling guidelines.
This jibes with both my personal experience at BigTech, knowing the industry and various publicly available leveling guidelines. Sone are more granular
https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html
https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/
The company I work for now has similar leveling guidelines, it’s also more granular.
But levels are defined by scope, impact, and dealing with ambiguity
So are you really arguing that tech companies that pay top of the industry don’t require that you demonstrate that you can handle responsibility that requires you to be able to work at a larger scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity and go through a promotion process with a promo doc?
Are you saying that when you interview for one of those tech companies that they don’t level you according to your past experience?
Yes I know the answers to all of these questions from both personal experience of interviewing and hiring at one BigTech company and ignoring outreach from another’s hiring manager who I had worked with in the past.
(At 51, I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than ever work at a large company again and I am damn sure not going back into an office)
When did this "junior/senior" lingo get cool? I don't remember it being used when I was young. Maybe the leet code trend brought on a sort of gamification of the profession, with ranks etc..?