The title has always existed. I meant the obsession about being a "a junior" or "a senior", like gaining an achievement in a video game or something. I just thought every young person was a junior engineer and every old person was as senior engineer.
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.
The bigger the company the less impressive "senior" is. There are probably three levels of staff above it and then distinguished super fellow territory.
A senior software engineer can easily make $300-400K+ at BigTech that’s “impressive” enough to me.
On the other hand, a “senior” working at a bank or other large non tech company will probably be making less than $175K if you aren’t working on the west coast.
For instance Delta
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/delta-air-lines/salaries
I'm deleting my hn account. Have a good day.
It really only matters on an individual level once you become a manager, and have both juniors and seniors to manage.
It matters to me as a senior+.
When I talk to a senior: “hey we got this initiative, I know only little about it. Can you talk to $stake_holder figure out what they need and come back to me and let me know your design ideas, how long you think it will take, etc”.
I can do that with a few seniors and put Epics together and they can take ownership of it.
For a junior I have to do a lot more handholding and make sure the requirements are well spelled out