> I started my first software job out of college in July of 2023. In January 2026, two and a half years later, I secured my second promotion, earning the title of Senior Software Engineer.
> certainly there are hard lessons that I have yet to learn in my career - but my company does not hand that title out like candy
> had (and still have) an excellent mentor <..> he had just been promoted to Senior SE. He was two years out of school himself.
I'm sure OP is a great engineer, and earned their promotion (genuinely, I am). But it sounds like his company hands out titles like candy.
As others have said titles are meaningless but I've worked with enough recruiters to know that they do have some sway on non-technical people..
It's both hustle and luck. One reason I left Microsoft was because I wasn't on track there. The organization was good but also top heavy so there wasn't room for growth. When I joined Rec Room the tech I built really clicked and the company scaled rapidly. Our team became critical and helped hundreds of coworkers advance their goals. I've heard another principal engineer describe this as, "being pulled into the white hot burning center of a company".
As far as I can tell there's no "trick" to hitting the role. I'd describe it more as, "repeatedly move mountains". There's some luck identifying the right mountains and luck + hustle moving them at all.
I like the insight of luck combined with incredible talent. Too many people get a bad taste in their mouth by leaders who only attribute success to hard work and dedication. Knowing what battles to really fight and die for is a talent in and of itself, but it's also a bit of luck to both have access to systems to allow you to impact important projects and also to end up impacting the right ones.
It's very frustrating to be able to have a massive impact, but not get any sort of notice for it. Many people just start punching a clock when that happens. I've done it.
When I meet fellow devs, I ask what projects they've shipped. Roles are near-meaningless across companies and convey 0 information about what their work involves in my experience. I appreciate that OP learned something about the job through this article.
Maybe not neccesarily exactly ten years, but you couldn't be both a junior and a senior so far as the roles have meaning. A senior is supposed to know how to function within the company and obstinately perform certain roles in their certain way, but a junior is supposed to come into the company fresh and try to simplify the work with their eyes that are not trained to do it the senior's way. Neither person is wrong but the roles need to be in opposition.
That's why it's so annoying to read about companies who think they can replace junior workers with AI. While imagining they're living in the future, they're not thinking about the future at all.
Eh, kinda. But there was enough self-deprecation there that it doesn't leave a bad taste in my mouth, and I consider this a genuine reflection.
> Why did I need validation from my org chart?
> Pretty quickly realized I was being kind of a bitch.
> I have a bad case of Why Not Me syndrome.
These cut deeper than faux modesty and are clearly insecurities. It's the rebelling of a sensible superego against an id hungry for validation, and the author doesn't downplay either of the two.
But yes, I'm sure he also gets a perverse thrill out of advertising his achievement, even if he intends to disparage it. It's a complicated psyche I'm rather familiar with.
> Do we have thoughts on how important "senior"/"staff" is vs bullet points on resumes and the years of service?
As a hiring manager, I only read the bullet points. I’ve interviewed startup CTOs who were mid-level engineers at best and “Software Engineer” vanilla titled engineers who have shipped and owned impressive things over years.
The scale, complexity, and variety of the systems you’ve built, shipped, owned, and maintained trumps all else.
And yes we can see through the bullshit. Everyone has built a “semantic document retrieval system” in the last 3 years. That’s a weekend project, gonna need a little more to be impressive :)
Interesting. Not looking to switch roles at present but what do you make of these two projects? One done basically over a weekend, one done over many weekends
Removed a bunch of bad code and got a 1/3rd speed up
When you work for a company like Google, that title change determines whether or not you are taken seriously. People that get stuck at the same level are often pushed out of teams with performance improvement plans. They expect you to strive for promotion and the culture in these places is reinforcing this progression. It's mostly theater but the outcomes for people's pay is very real, thus the focus on title.
> People that get stuck at the same level are often pushed out of teams with performance improvement plans.
Only if you get stuck at the entry level. L5, is considered terminal and no one will push you out for not going for L6.
(Google also recently 'declared' L4 a terminal position — likely so they could be stingier with L5 promotions — but what your manager considers terminal is what matters most)
Junior programmers are the idiot foil of all anecdotes on HN in the last three years. Only juniors do that; everything went fine until the junior...; anyway, the junior sent me a eight thousand diff of obvious slop; so now I got my first gray hairs, thanks Jane Junior; juniors writing naive, clearly quadratic code.[1]
Naturally these are the least skilled of your colleagues so that part is a given. But almost all anecdotes are about them as foils. Very few about them as the next generation being mentored.
It’s so slanted that people have to actively temper the euphoria shared by tech billionaires and 100X engineers with 25+ years of non-slop code experience: well until the seniors get an immortality pill you still need to raise new 100X engineers.
Of course the response to this will be, “I never cared about titles! The “juniors I talk about have work experience ranging from zero to thirty years!”...
First of all, congratulations. As somebody that also achieved the senior developer title within the first three years of being hired out of University, mostly by luck: Yay money, but I wasn't a senior engineer really for another five years. For me, I needed to see the long term effects of the changes that I'd made and the software I had written to really understand the difference between cargo cult behaviour and what really mattered for the business I was working for.
I disagree and think the software model described works better when done well. I have seen this within a company, where both the hardware side and software side used the same titles (senior, staff, senior staff, principal). The hardware side used largely a combination of industry tenure and especially whether they had PHDs/patents/inventions or not to determine these titles, while the software org was very gung ho on using responsibility and influence to determine promotions. The other thing this led to is in the hardware org, often people would get hired on as senior staff or principal, while this almost never happened on the software side (nobody could get hired on as these roles as they couldn't possibly meet the rubric, as it required some outsized impact in the company with thousands of people using software you near singlehandedly developed and maintained).
As other people pointed out in this post in a roundabout way, titles only matter at all internally to a given company. And considering that, compare these two systems; yes the software org in this system does end up in a position where a 25 year old that's been at the company for 3 years could be senior staff, but that's very telling, to do that, they absolutely had to ship something novel, useful to many, and keep it running and good. Knowing that someone is a very well educated graybeard that invented something at Sun in 1989 is also some good information, but from the context of communicating with people in other orgs within a company I don't know so well, it's more valuable to me personally to understand whether they are responsible for a large running process and to what degree, moreso than how long they have been around and what they did elsewhere.
Kind of reminds me of martial arts. You got what some call McDojo's where a 13 year old can be a "black belt" after 9 months vs. more "traditional" styles where after 5 years of hard work you get there. For the traditional styles this black belt is generally views as "serious beginner" or internalizing the basics.
Real learning takes time. Someone with 3 years of experience writing software is at the beginning of their professional development.
Ofcourse time alone is not enough. But time x work x aptitude = progression.
The inflation of "senior engineer" makes us look to many like the McDojo black belts.
Senior Engineer means many different things, even within the same company. It could mean, "This person is more productive than everybody else around them" or it could mean, "This person isn't that great at software development but they know some product area so deeply that it would be too expensive to replace them."
Haha, I know people who have worked on designing a single part smaller than a closed fist for over 5 years and were still considered just over junior because they didn't have enough experience with the system it was used in.
> When I had learned that, my first instinct was to be happy for him, proud, impressed, etc (genuinely). My second was to want the same for myself. Badly.
> [...] Think back (addressing you, the reader, now) to the time when you were happiest in your career or academic life. Was it when some sinecurist asshole in a gown handed you your diploma?
Uh, what? This is what this person wanted. Now after the fact they’re an anti-credentialist rebel.
Well, thinking of people who make a lot of money and then insist that money doesn’t matter. It makes sense.
> Going forward, the only person I need to impress is myself.
Thinking of the few things that I take quiet pride in because I only want to impress myself... I keep myself in check by not talking about it. lol.
> I started my first software job out of college in July of 2023. In January 2026, two and a half years later, I secured my second promotion, earning the title of Senior Software Engineer.
> certainly there are hard lessons that I have yet to learn in my career - but my company does not hand that title out like candy
> had (and still have) an excellent mentor <..> he had just been promoted to Senior SE. He was two years out of school himself.
I'm sure OP is a great engineer, and earned their promotion (genuinely, I am). But it sounds like his company hands out titles like candy.
As others have said titles are meaningless but I've worked with enough recruiters to know that they do have some sway on non-technical people..
I hit principal pretty early on in my career. I keep a detailed work history for anyone interested in what that journey is like: https://www.tyleo.com/professional-work-history
It's both hustle and luck. One reason I left Microsoft was because I wasn't on track there. The organization was good but also top heavy so there wasn't room for growth. When I joined Rec Room the tech I built really clicked and the company scaled rapidly. Our team became critical and helped hundreds of coworkers advance their goals. I've heard another principal engineer describe this as, "being pulled into the white hot burning center of a company".
As far as I can tell there's no "trick" to hitting the role. I'd describe it more as, "repeatedly move mountains". There's some luck identifying the right mountains and luck + hustle moving them at all.
I like the insight of luck combined with incredible talent. Too many people get a bad taste in their mouth by leaders who only attribute success to hard work and dedication. Knowing what battles to really fight and die for is a talent in and of itself, but it's also a bit of luck to both have access to systems to allow you to impact important projects and also to end up impacting the right ones.
It's very frustrating to be able to have a massive impact, but not get any sort of notice for it. Many people just start punching a clock when that happens. I've done it.
When I meet fellow devs, I ask what projects they've shipped. Roles are near-meaningless across companies and convey 0 information about what their work involves in my experience. I appreciate that OP learned something about the job through this article.
This isn’t foolproof either and plenty of people can talk convincingly about running projects that they had little to nothing to do with.
I was senior in about three years. It helps to work for a consultancy company, they can charge a higher rate by calling me a senior.
Personally I don't think you can be a senior before ten years of fulltime work.
Maybe not neccesarily exactly ten years, but you couldn't be both a junior and a senior so far as the roles have meaning. A senior is supposed to know how to function within the company and obstinately perform certain roles in their certain way, but a junior is supposed to come into the company fresh and try to simplify the work with their eyes that are not trained to do it the senior's way. Neither person is wrong but the roles need to be in opposition.
That's why it's so annoying to read about companies who think they can replace junior workers with AI. While imagining they're living in the future, they're not thinking about the future at all.
That’s sort of how it works in banks where basically everyone is a VP.
Humblebrag masquerading as self-reflection.
I think that's rather unkind.
From my perspective: it looks like a coming of age ... blinking into adulthood sort of voyage of discovery.
Eh, kinda. But there was enough self-deprecation there that it doesn't leave a bad taste in my mouth, and I consider this a genuine reflection.
> Why did I need validation from my org chart? > Pretty quickly realized I was being kind of a bitch. > I have a bad case of Why Not Me syndrome.
These cut deeper than faux modesty and are clearly insecurities. It's the rebelling of a sensible superego against an id hungry for validation, and the author doesn't downplay either of the two.
But yes, I'm sure he also gets a perverse thrill out of advertising his achievement, even if he intends to disparage it. It's a complicated psyche I'm rather familiar with.
"what does the dog actually do if it catches it?"
Author achieved the senior role, but is unsure what comes next.
Do we have thoughts on how important "senior"/"staff" is vs bullet points on resumes and the years of service?
> Do we have thoughts on how important "senior"/"staff" is vs bullet points on resumes and the years of service?
As a hiring manager, I only read the bullet points. I’ve interviewed startup CTOs who were mid-level engineers at best and “Software Engineer” vanilla titled engineers who have shipped and owned impressive things over years.
The scale, complexity, and variety of the systems you’ve built, shipped, owned, and maintained trumps all else.
And yes we can see through the bullshit. Everyone has built a “semantic document retrieval system” in the last 3 years. That’s a weekend project, gonna need a little more to be impressive :)
Interesting. Not looking to switch roles at present but what do you make of these two projects? One done basically over a weekend, one done over many weekends
Removed a bunch of bad code and got a 1/3rd speed up
https://github.com/mhostetter/gr-adsb/pull/69
Added a new chip to qemu along with some significant peripherals. Never finished it but I did boot Linux on it I think with the upstream device tree.
https://github.com/Neywiny/qemu/tree/h745
I have no idea what goes on in the minds of HR people.
An interesting point. Presumably you'd come at it from a different though equally valid angle
I ignore job titles on resumes. I want to know what they did, I don't care what their company called them.
Who cares about titles?
It's a really bad signal when a software developer cares about their title.
All that matters is are you good at the work.
The title often relates to the money, which is the bit you probably want.
When you work for a company like Google, that title change determines whether or not you are taken seriously. People that get stuck at the same level are often pushed out of teams with performance improvement plans. They expect you to strive for promotion and the culture in these places is reinforcing this progression. It's mostly theater but the outcomes for people's pay is very real, thus the focus on title.
> People that get stuck at the same level are often pushed out of teams with performance improvement plans.
Only if you get stuck at the entry level. L5, is considered terminal and no one will push you out for not going for L6.
(Google also recently 'declared' L4 a terminal position — likely so they could be stingier with L5 promotions — but what your manager considers terminal is what matters most)
Sounds awful, spending headspace and energy on trying to climb some stupid corporate ladder.
Junior programmers are the idiot foil of all anecdotes on HN in the last three years. Only juniors do that; everything went fine until the junior...; anyway, the junior sent me a eight thousand diff of obvious slop; so now I got my first gray hairs, thanks Jane Junior; juniors writing naive, clearly quadratic code.[1]
Naturally these are the least skilled of your colleagues so that part is a given. But almost all anecdotes are about them as foils. Very few about them as the next generation being mentored.
It’s so slanted that people have to actively temper the euphoria shared by tech billionaires and 100X engineers with 25+ years of non-slop code experience: well until the seniors get an immortality pill you still need to raise new 100X engineers.
Of course the response to this will be, “I never cared about titles! The “juniors I talk about have work experience ranging from zero to thirty years!”...
[1] Sources: all made up.
First of all, congratulations. As somebody that also achieved the senior developer title within the first three years of being hired out of University, mostly by luck: Yay money, but I wasn't a senior engineer really for another five years. For me, I needed to see the long term effects of the changes that I'd made and the software I had written to really understand the difference between cargo cult behaviour and what really mattered for the business I was working for.
So many kids on hacker news
- I’d say SWE is an experienced engineer not a senior developer- for Pete’s sake he graduated in 2023 that was 3 freaking years ago
I’ve been developing production software for 20 years now -
What other profession counts someone with 3 years of professional experience out of college as senior?
Maybe competitive sports? Or academic math?
If it means this kid is smart and good at coding sure ill buy that but experiences and wisdom are something else entirely..
I disagree and think the software model described works better when done well. I have seen this within a company, where both the hardware side and software side used the same titles (senior, staff, senior staff, principal). The hardware side used largely a combination of industry tenure and especially whether they had PHDs/patents/inventions or not to determine these titles, while the software org was very gung ho on using responsibility and influence to determine promotions. The other thing this led to is in the hardware org, often people would get hired on as senior staff or principal, while this almost never happened on the software side (nobody could get hired on as these roles as they couldn't possibly meet the rubric, as it required some outsized impact in the company with thousands of people using software you near singlehandedly developed and maintained).
As other people pointed out in this post in a roundabout way, titles only matter at all internally to a given company. And considering that, compare these two systems; yes the software org in this system does end up in a position where a 25 year old that's been at the company for 3 years could be senior staff, but that's very telling, to do that, they absolutely had to ship something novel, useful to many, and keep it running and good. Knowing that someone is a very well educated graybeard that invented something at Sun in 1989 is also some good information, but from the context of communicating with people in other orgs within a company I don't know so well, it's more valuable to me personally to understand whether they are responsible for a large running process and to what degree, moreso than how long they have been around and what they did elsewhere.
Kind of reminds me of martial arts. You got what some call McDojo's where a 13 year old can be a "black belt" after 9 months vs. more "traditional" styles where after 5 years of hard work you get there. For the traditional styles this black belt is generally views as "serious beginner" or internalizing the basics.
Real learning takes time. Someone with 3 years of experience writing software is at the beginning of their professional development.
Ofcourse time alone is not enough. But time x work x aptitude = progression.
The inflation of "senior engineer" makes us look to many like the McDojo black belts.
Senior Engineer means many different things, even within the same company. It could mean, "This person is more productive than everybody else around them" or it could mean, "This person isn't that great at software development but they know some product area so deeply that it would be too expensive to replace them."
Haha, I know people who have worked on designing a single part smaller than a closed fist for over 5 years and were still considered just over junior because they didn't have enough experience with the system it was used in.
> When I had learned that, my first instinct was to be happy for him, proud, impressed, etc (genuinely). My second was to want the same for myself. Badly.
> [...] Think back (addressing you, the reader, now) to the time when you were happiest in your career or academic life. Was it when some sinecurist asshole in a gown handed you your diploma?
Uh, what? This is what this person wanted. Now after the fact they’re an anti-credentialist rebel.
Well, thinking of people who make a lot of money and then insist that money doesn’t matter. It makes sense.
> Going forward, the only person I need to impress is myself.
Thinking of the few things that I take quiet pride in because I only want to impress myself... I keep myself in check by not talking about it. lol.