I've been very disappointed by comparing people's titles with their actual technical ability -- somehow it never seems to be the case that the ability outstrips the title.
Really? You've never worked with a junior who's punching far above their weight? I've had several on my team and work as hard as I can to get them promoted asap.
That said, it definitely gets rarer the higher up you go.
TIL: This is a really interesting perspective; Thank You for this! I will use it from now to calm myself down. I, always either got mortified by the extreme skill of my juniors or by the incompetence of seniors — not sure if it’s the case with me or is it a general feeling.
The Kendo way at-least makes me ignore the titles :)
Beating that higher ranked player promotes you to their rank (and demoted them). It's like a mini boss that the game doesn't tell you about.
That's one benefit but I think that the main benefit is that when you've a high level, you'll know that this guy in front of you is a beginner and you'll go soft on him, which is quite important: if he doesn't know how to fall properly the beginner could be injured if the "high level" guy doesn't notice in time..
People get promoted until they reach their level of incompetence :-)
> and seeing your influence grow as you are trusted with more things.
That's the ideal scenario, that you earn the esteem and trust of your peers because the work you do speaks for itself.
The flipside with this is, this process takes time. It really takes years. Sometimes there will not be that time. You are a new hire brought in to do a high-impact thing; or a high-impact project crosses across the entire organization where suddenly all participants are relative stranger; or the team you worked in was of very low external visibility but a mentor recognized your potential and pulled you out to help recalibrate a different but malfunctioning team, etc...
Then titles are important. It is very unfortunate that we are very cynical of titles, because, in well-run organizations, they are meaningful, and in fact, should be meaningful. Imagine in the military if every officer had to prove themselves over and over again. It's unworkable.
At some point, larger organizations will need to grant leverage to a technical individual. A title helps with providing that.
I've also seen the opposite, perfectly fine engineers get worse after a promotion due to the weight of the title, without any other change to their work / schedule.
It's really dehumanizing. I think I'd rather not know people's titles, just what team they're on, and their role.
Ended up doing something similar in my original tech job as well. I'm not sure I've ever really used my official HR title and would probably have to look it up to be sure I'm remembering it correctly.
Also, lots of folk deliberately opt out of level visibility, too.
Does having limited ambition make you a bad dev/engineer, if you keep learning new things and contributing quality code at your current level of responsibility?
Sure, you might have some specialized knowledge or understand system X better than anybody else, but there's diminishing returns on that, hence why you won't get big raises forever.
As you move up the chain, it eventually stops being about your direct technical contributions and about your ability to multiply the value of everybody under you in your org.
I thought that was the whole point of the IC track: putting a technical person into a role where they can be a multiplier without burdening them with management responsibilities.
Every staff/principle/architect IC I've ever worked with has had that kind of positive effect on the teams around them. Their schedules were indistinguishable from most managers, except they met mostly one on one and they could get a senior engineer's worth of work (impact wise) done in between the meetings instead of paying the management overhead.
I don't disagree that principle engineers can and should have a big multiplying effect, but I also wouldn't consider them strictly IC's either, even if they don't have people managing duties.
Pretty much that, except that I wouldn't use the word "stagnate". What I said was "lag behind the cost of living", which might not have been the most concise way of putting it, but I hoped it would get my point across.
Essentially, the conundrum I've faced too often is that if you're not climbing the ladder, the purchasing power of your salary will start falling, even if your salary rises, because the raises you get reflect the lack of regard the company has for people who aren't climbing the ladder.
Stagnation, for me, would be to stay at the more-or-less same purchasing power. And I would be fine with that.
This will forever strike me as a post hoc rationalization for justifying salary increases when the truth is that the salary increase is just a natural outcome of being granted institutional authority. This is the most visible with the CEOs that fail being given absurd bonuses and then justifying that as necessary to attract top talent. The people that are value divisors are still given huge remunerations precisely because of the position, not because of their impact.
To the exclusionary aspect of the idea, unless your employees are being micromanaged then a large part of their work is discretionary. If they are not being kept in the dark and are not working alone then a large part of their work is also collaborative. Putting these things together, your good employees will field requests from other teams, prioritize them on an ad hoc basis, connect dots and report opportunities amongst themselves: solving problems that influence many more customers than the direct ones they work with. Promoting them will move them out of the circle where they learn about these situations on the ground. Instead of multiplying your capabilities, you may end up dividing your people by removing a key communicator from the employee social network when you promote them. Potentially, everyone recognizes there is a problem, but the problem solver role is a vacuum. Worse if nobody is able to recognize there is a problem now that the person who was able to recognize it is faced with different challenges.
Institutional authority is not isomorphic to collaborative potential (or any general notion of work multiplication). Personal authority, respect, cooperation, skill, insight, all kinds of things can make a person's individual contributions many times greater. All these things are independent of institutional authority and the actual use of institutional authority will almost always come off as a cheap form of insecurity: "Do it because I'm the boss."
The truth is that it is easy to create a hierarchy and challenging to measure impact.
If you're happy with where you are, and happy with your salary and status, then it's fine to stay there! Certainly, as you say, continue to learn new things, make quality contributions, and get your work done.
Many companies will have what they call "terminal levels" for individual contributors (most probably don't really advertise this unless you specifically talk about it with your manager). The idea is that you can work at a level where you can get your day-to-day work done with minimal guidance, even if you need guidance on the bigger picture stuff (like what you should be working on, and why). You should certainly talk to your manager about this, if you feel comfortable. And if you don't, and/or they keep pushing you to climb the ladder further, then yeah, you should probably find a new gig.
One caveat: ageism is still an unfortunate thing in our industry, and as you get into your 40s and beyond, if you're still "only" a "senior software engineer", you may have trouble getting new jobs.
Companies don't want to get stuck with people who are perpetually "junior" and need a lot of hand-holding to get their jobs done. That's of course ok for a while someone is learning and growing, but if they aren't growing out of that, they're a liability and time sink. But once you're past that point, you should be ok. The only problem is if you end up at a weird place where no one wants to progress up through staff/principal/architect/fellow, in which case I wouldn't be surprised if everyone starts getting pressured to up their ambition. But that sort of scenario seems somewhat unlikely?
[0] Well, unless they are in your immediate family and your lack of ambition is putting their livelihood at risk in ways they can't mitigate. But I'm assuming that's not the case here ;)
Not 100% always, mind you, but way more often than not.
The fact that someone else is doing more or less with a higher title shouldn't influence your life at all. Jealousy shouldn't tell you when you should look for a job. If you are unhappy leave if you are happy stay. If your happiness is determined by what a random person is paid you will never be happy.
There might be some honesty / truth behind what is described but in my 2 decades of IT work, mostly ass kissers have taken home the big bucks .
I think this is a logical contradiction. If there exists people that you are in a position to judge their competence you deserve to be in their position or higher, therefore it cannot be that they are 1-2 levels higher than you.
Logic is a great tool by the way, but unless you are applying it formally you might be better off not trying to invoke it casually.
When I see titles, it just makes unhelpful thoughts enter my head, like: are all these people “at my level” really contributing as much as me? Sometimes I even thought the reverse, like: how can this seemingly-junior person still be stuck at that level, when he is clearly doing all this great stuff we depend on every day? Of course the especially soul-crushing case is when you encounter people that clearly suck at what they do, and they’re 1-2 levels above you; and worse, I have occasionally seen those people promoted further!
It is also hard not to look at titles on places like LinkedIn. I know I shouldn’t care, since titles mean different things at every company, and some especially-impressive-sounding titles can range from “meh” to “god-level” depending on where it is. And yet, it gets in my head sometimes, making me wonder every few years if I am at the level I should be.
When the title “matters” at a company, it also makes me consider it a factor in annual reviews. If I get a raise, bonus, etc. but see my damned title stagnate year over year, suddenly I care about this and take it as a complete lack of recognition by the company (that literally would not happen if they simply did not tell me what my title is!).