My gripe with the "Senior Engineer" title is that I've NEVER met anyone with 5+ years experience who didn't view themselves as "senior". Usually 3+ years.

In a market where there are more job openings than employable candidates, and competition for talent leads to rampant ego-stroking and title-inflation... the term "senior" has become just another word for "competent". Someone who can work independently without hand-holding.

So how do we verbally distinguish that from, "No, I really DO mean 'senior'"? Most people get 40+ working years in a career. How do you encourage humility and self-awareness, so that people don't honestly believe they've reached the 90th percentile after the only first 10% of that journey?

Here's my world view.

A junior engineer is proud he got his code to work, an experienced engineer is proud of the code he wrote to get the feature to work, and a senior engineer is proud of the code he didn't have to write to get it to work.

>>>The interviewers know the real problems facing the company, but the polite fiction is that they’re only temporary, and soon everyone will be able to focus entirely on the algorithms, which are what really matter. Since most companies tell the same story, candidates have to read between the lines to see if there’s a good fit.

I've walked away from a few places because of the interview process. It's like the old song the gambler by Kenny Rodgers. You need to know when to walk away and know when to run.

If I get put in a room with a puzzle sheet and they lock the door for 20 minutes, I'm out. Not because I can't solve the problems, but because any company that thinks my ONLY value is in solving puzzle questions has no idea how to hire people and have devaluated the role of the senior SE's at that company. You can tell a lot about a company by the way in which they conduct the interview process.

I'm reminded of an experience many years ago, when talking to a couple of other senior engineers about a talented but hotheaded young manager who couldn't understand why we were all so cautious about new ideas. We decided that what he really needed was a death march - the experience of being stuck on a project that is inevitably doomed, and having to push on through to the bitter end anyway. That'd teach him!

Great article. I really appreciate that the OP describes a more closed-form solution to what makes a senior engineer, rather than platitudes like "learn 5 languages".

One nit I'd pick with it though is that many large and bureaucratic companies won't appreciate an engineer who decides it on them to fix hiring, culture, product marketing fit and marketing. If you find yourself in this position, it's time to move on to somewhere else that will. Typically, those companies are startups.

This captures the role quite well.

Please share this with your interviewers. It's stupid to reject senior engineers just because they didn't implement algorithm optimization towards the end of an interview...ignoring everything else they are capable of.

This is very incisive, and matches my experience.

Oh, you're an engineer because you make websites? I'm a medical doctor because I repair machines.

I find this article fundamentally confused. The author spends a lot of time talking about what he invisions a senior engineer ought to be in his opinion (which involves all kinds of ownership). But senior engineer is just a title, it can't be used wrongly, because it's inherently a meaningless cat-and-mouse money game between employees and companies. It's politics; it's a name.

Much in the same way that somebody founding a startup can be "engineer" or "CTO" or "Software king Ninja Level 7 dan grandmaster." Titles will never be objectively consistent, this is why the whole industry is now discussing consistent interviews instead hiring based on titles on resumes.