I got promoted to "senior" developer less than 6 months out of university because my employer wanted to inflate the credibility of his consulting business.

Job titles aren't standardised and can be pretty meaningless between organisations.

I recently saw a resume claiming to be a "Senior X" where they claimed literally zero experience in X. (X in this case is a type of work, not a language.) Given that the person in question had what appeared to be a standard bachelor's degree with no particular focus in X and less than two years of work experience in the general field total... it was a bit hard to believe.

(If that's "Senior", then what of someone that does have ten years of experience? "Decrepit Software Engineer"? Maybe a series of promotions named after increasingly elaborate tombs? Grave Marker, Marble Headstone, Vault, Mausoleum, Master of the Crypt. Who wouldn't want to be introduced as "Software Engineer and Master of the Crypt"? Apropos of the current day. Or maybe progressive tiers of Undead. "Jerf, Lich Lord of Software Engineering". That could work. Or maybe you want to go up the Vampire tier... "Jerf, Vampire Patriarch of Software Engineering".)

Yep, same thing happened to me. I was a computer operator for a small company that was trying to start a new line of business in the mid 90s. I was introduced as their "lead developer with 5+ years of experience". The "experience" was writing Applesoft Basic and Assembly language programs in middle school and high school and doing a contract for a college while I was in college writing HyperCard Stacks....

Now 20 years later, I'm introduced as the "Lead AWS Architect" because I have about a year of experience with AWS and three certs....

That's my experience as well. In the first 6 months in my first job out of college the product manager started introducing me as the senior developer, and some years later while working for another company the project manager introduced me as the senior backend developer at a point where I had zero professional backend experience.

Agreed with this completely. People really shouldn't be offended by job titles as they vary so much between companies.

Experience and output matter. I can't imagine interviewing someone and asking about the current job title.

Has this person managed people? Lead teams? Done good work? Great. Title doesn't really matter for that.

At my startup, the sycophant with the least skills got promoted to CTO when the other one threw in the towel and there was only 3 weeks to the AGM. So... yeah - job titles don't belie abilities/experience

This isn't unique to tech, either. In a lot of enterprise sales orgs, literally everyone is a "VP".

Duetsche Bank counts a metric ton of Director's haha. I noticed it when clicking through LinkedIn.

To be fair, I actually have around 7 years of experience total, not just the 3 I've worked full-time. It's just that most of those years I was working as a freelancer. My first employer initially thought that the freelance work didn't make me worthy of being more than a junior, and back then, I didn't really know enough about working at a company to disagree.

In those 7 years, I've built up and shipped quite a few products, so I definitely feel like I can say I have more than 2 years of useful experience. But don't feel too offended, I don't really consider myself to be senior - it's just a title that my employers offer me. I definitely know I still have a long way to go before I'm a good developer.

The "senior" title is not about the length of your tenure. It's about your ability to independently solve difficult problems and provide leadership to those around you.

And I think it's even a little more than this. I've certainly seen college grads come up with impressive algorithms and "solve hard problems". For me senior is having seen other people solve hard problems in the past and fail spectacularly when their math meets implementation details. Maybe the approach requires too much precision from data entry clerks., Maybe it's particularly sensitive to GC pauses or doesn't distribute well given potential bandwidth issues between DC's. Maybe its a awesome but future devs will find it so terse as to be un-editable. A lot of being a senior to me is having seen many production systems and learned the weird ass ways they can go wrong.

Still not saying you can't do that at 18, but you probably needed to quit high school and start consulting for teams at 14 to get the experience in by then!

The word itself implies more experience than others. More experience is usually correlated to length of your tenure. But yes I agree, other qualities of senior developers include what you wrote.

Just being a devils advocate here: I was 14 leading the school programming club and I thought I solved really difficult issue setting up gentoo. Senior at 14?

Senior within the context of the club, yes.

Depends on the culture of the country many counties have custom and practice that you have to do X years as a grade before you can move up.

Perhaps the guy is really good/ambitious? I've had to deal with the stigma of being "above average", and it bothers me when I hear stuff like this. This sort of thinking stops people who have the drive to do something, and it makes them delay their enthusiasm until others feel they deserve a chance. That's just terrible in my opinion. And it's probably part of the reason why so many young people start a startup or go and work for one; so their talent and enthusiasm can actually yield something worthwhile, rather than be hindered by various corporate paradigms.

Even if it is a good developer, I don't believe the qualities of senior developer are being acquired so quickly. Do you really need people lying to you that you are senior to make you feel motivated? Ok I can do that, but I think it's unhealthy for you and for the industry.

What do you want to convey when you write >Senior< Software engineer on your resume? IMO that you have a lot of experience in the field.

Most of the people say they were promoted so their business can sell them as senior. That's BS. I would not like to work with those businesses. Keep calling yourselves seniors.

ps. I dealt with the same stigma, and I would feel ashamed when I joined a team where all the devs were 35+ with 10+ YOE and I would call myself the same title as they did. (I was 21 in this example, with 5 years of professional experience). Am I too humble?

> Even if it is a good developer, I don't believe the qualities of senior developer are being acquired so quickly.

So here's where I have my issue. Why can't someone acquire those qualities quickly? Why should your belief be factored in when gauging someone's expertise? I say, let's just look at their abilities and then decide. You may be surprised at how quickly some people pick up certain skills!

> Most of the people say they were promoted so their business can sell them as senior. That's BS. I would not like to work with those businesses. Keep calling yourselves seniors.

Here I agree with you. Random titles for the sake of duping people make no sense either and are potentially harmful.

> ps. I dealt with the same stigma, and I would feel ashamed when I joined a team where all the devs were 35+ with 10+ YOE and I would call myself the same title as they did. (I was 21 in this example, with 5 years of professional experience). Am I too humble?

I would say yes. If you are able to perform the same tasks as them, with the same/better level of finesse, then the only differentiator is age. Why shouldn't you have the same pay packet/title/respect? I believe age is generally positively correlated with experience (i.e. more age = more experience), but I feel it is not really correlated with insight (more age != better insight). Thus, sometimes, younger people can have better ideas and inputs than their older colleagues and deserve the 'senior' title as much as someone that's been working 30+ years, in my opinion.

> Why can't someone acquire those qualities quickly? Because there is no time to do the full cycle from start to release more than twice in 2 years.

Usually a project that will give you decent insights takes some time to build. Usually at least 6 months and then several months to see what you did wrong. So if you did this cycle once, you are not aware of how you screwed it up and if other methods would yield better results. If you did it twice you already have the basis to compare methods. Senior ideally tried several approaches and there is simply no time for this in 2 years imo.

> I would say yes...

Thanks. Looking at this thread I changed my perspective. 1. it's context based, you can be senior after 3 months if your other senior left and you have couple of new people that you need to onboard 2. titles mean absolutely nothing when hiring 3. If I am doing the same work as others I deserve the same title (age made me uncomfortable)

So yeah, initially I got offended because I called myself senior later than I could and it seemed unfair.

Yes, this is a bit of a micro version of the "should people developing software be allowed to call themselves engineers": some people want a formalised system which guarantees that people have passed certain tests and have a certain level of experience, other people observe that many of our heroes and CEOs are bright autodidacts. Is it a good idea to pull up the ladder? And besides, technology shifts and there are plenty of people working on technologies that weren't invented at the time they graduated. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, Andy Grove was a refugee who would have great difficulty getting into 21st century America, etc.

I agree that a lot of vital expertise comes from mistaken attempts and the need to change strategies.

Just as another data point: I have been looking at it like you in the past, but now I’m getting old enough that I worked with enough engineers to realize that whole experience has a general correlation with seniority, there is a huge variation between individual.

I have in mind one of the most skilled and mature engineer I have ever collaborated with who has less than two years professional experience. I also worked with many 10y experienced folks who qualify as senior for this, but were pretty sloppy otherwise.

Why are you offended? The market considers them senior...

I spent 5+ years in the industry and felt weird calling myself senior. Just because you are a friend with CEO and he can vouch for your title doesn't make you senior.

In 2 years of experience how many serious products can you take from start to finish? In my opinion, a senior developer is a person who did this multiple times.

It's almost like calling yourself lead developer of 1 man team...

Titles are a means to categorise resource by HR.

Titles merely offer a bracket of salary that a resource can have, once they reach the peak they either have to go up a rank or leave to get more pay.

At a bank, the salespeople and analysts are called Vice Presidents. It's just a name.

Being Lead Developer in a one person team definitely sounds reasonable. You are still the lead dev on the project and have to take on all the responsiblities (even more so than if the team was bigger?).

> You are still the lead dev on the project and have to take on all the responsiblities

Except the responsibility of leading other people, on a resume this title would imply you gained that experience while in fact you didn't.

"lead" doesn't mean that at all in this context it's technical leadership

To me even technical leadership still implies there are people that are less technically advanced that follow or benefit from the leadership. In general any leader implies followers, otherwise, what are you leading?

Note that I didn't say manage other people. I'm talking about helping get the better of the team, showing a junior member how things can be done better, etc. Like a team captain, not a coach.

I've never interpreted it as meaning leading people but rather leading the development of a project (or some portion of it). In fact, at IBM, I saw teams have multiple lead devs.