We're not interested in hiring "perpetual juniors". The increased oversight of junior employees is an investment in them becoming senior in a 2-3 year timeframe. The skills listed above are for independent action, follow-through, communication, and teamwork, in a tech lead position, which are more important than writing code. If you haven't acquired those skills by now, it's unlikely any amount of mentorship will teach them to you, so it's going to be a pass.

> The increased oversight of junior employees is an investment in them becoming senior in a 2-3 year timeframe.

So in your mind, they go straight from junior to senior? I've been developing software for 8 years now, and still call myself intermediate. Senior is for people with incredibly deep knowledge of multiple technologies and how they work together, in my mind.

We don't have an intermediate role, the step after Software Development Expert II is Senior Software Development Expert. This is pretty consistent among peer companies. Your description of senior isn't inaccurate, but, after many years of schooling, personal development experience, and on-the-job training, it's expected that people will gain that level of expertise in at least one domain -- maybe not to the same degree you're expecting, but career progression does not necessarily stop at SSDE.

Have you considered that this model is perhaps only a current trend and that it isn’t necessarily the “correct” model?

Sure, but, we're already well over capacity as it is. Feel free to experiment at your company.

Careful not to conflate this with management.

Even individual engineers will get tasked with solving problems, start to finish. And even if not, you were part of a team that did it. Talk about the process of how you contributed to some meaningful unit of work.

I don’t care about what tools you know. I can teach everyone how to program. Everyone. Programming is really not hard.

I can’t teach everyone how to be an adept problem solver or how to work in a team (in any role) to actually ship things reasonably bug free and on time. I can’t teach everyone how to work in harmony with others. I can’t teach everyone how to gracefully handle all the business realities that throw wrenches into software purity.

To add a bit: what I’m trying frantically to figure out in the hiring process is if you’re an asshole or not. I can’t fix that. If you don’t know some language or tool, that doesn’t even register as a problem to me. But if you seem stubborn and too opinionated, especially on trivial things, I don’t care if you’re a programming wizard.

It isn’t unreasonable to want to hire people that will be able to grow into senior positions. If you are demonstrating that you’ll never do that, this is a red flag for hiring.