There is no standard whatsoever for the adjective "Senior" when applied to engineers:
Sometimes it means, "Able to work without someone looking over their shoulder at all times."
Sometimes it means, "Able to lead and mentor others."
And sometimes it means, "Has organizational skills above and beyond engineering skills, able to lead cross-team initiatives and deal with all the human/organization issues around the engineering."
The latter definition is the most interesting to me, it describes what "Staff" and "Principal" engineers do in most orgs. But if I had to pick a line to draw, I'd say that while a Staff or Principal spends most or all of their time working on projects that involve the human/organization issues around the engineering, a senior engineer is one who does this at least part of the time.
There are other, perfectly valid perspectives on what makes an engineer "senior," but what I like about this one that's relevant to TFA is that this kind of "seniority" is hard to fake.
On a related note, I dated a woman who was promoted to vice president of a small start up when she was in her 20's. She had to hide her title on her resume when she left because no established firm wanted to hire someone whom they assumed they'd need to pay a quarter million dollars to be competitive.
This is hilarious because I recently had a junior dev come to me to discuss issues they were having with their (incompetent) software manager.
She said "I don't understand why he doesn't understand the technical aspects. It must be me...I must be bad at communicating because [the manager] was a CTO at a startup!"
I literally laughed out loud. Her communication skills were fantastic, but she was so new and naive to think that titles from a startup have literally any worth.
Haha. “CTO in small startup” can easily mean 3 friends got together and tried to make an app in moms basement, while giving each other fancy roles.
Never look at titles alone. Their scope vary wildly across companies. Even in big corporations they can be used by friends patting each other on the back or to make employees feel important as an alternative to giving an actual raise.
I understand the problem of ridiculously inflated titles (like “VP Alliance and Strategic Partnerships World…” for the first employee doing sales) but on the other hand I don’t really see an alternative for CEO and CTO, what would be more appropriate titles for co founders for small startups?
While it might have been a young CTO at a small startup, the field of technology is vast, it's not the job of the CTO to understand all aspects of it.
Similarly, when I started in Engineering, I didn't understand quite how much complexity existed in all the other areas of running a company, I've since learned much about them and have much more respect for CEO's who have to manage all of those issues.
> Sometimes grandiose titles can work against you.
Early stage startups can be especially hilarious that way, especially when young founders/early stage employees mistakenly feel they need a "big" title to be taken seriously...
Yep, indeed. I'm technically the CTO of the startup I'm helping to found. And even though I'm 37, I haven't been in tech long enough to feel like I've earned that title, so my LinkedIn says Chief Software Architect (I made it up).
"It's interesting, these titles," Musk said. "You know that there's actually only three titles that actually mean anything for a corporation? It's president, secretary, and treasurer. And technically they can be the same person. And all these other titles are just basically made up. So CEO is a made-up title, CFO is a made-up title. General counsel, a made-up title. They don't mean anything."
What Musk is saying is that from a legal perspective, there are only three job titles/roles that must be filled in a corporation. Beyond that, they could literally have titles like "Grand Chief Space Wizard" and "Cheesy Toast" for various jobs and roles. They could call the role of General Counsel "Asshole in a Suit."
I think this quote is actually about a different point. The President, Secretary and Treasurer don't need any actual credentials for their role like a council needs a JD, but they have specific responsibility/liability in corporate legal structures.
The man is plainly over-reaching here, though perhaps it's an expression meant to bolster his public persona, and not an actual representation of his knowledge.
General counsel (at least in the Anglo-American context) means the senior legal advisor to an organization. As attorneys, they are required by law to have admission to the bar of the relevant jurisdiction, and to observe certain ethical standards and practices. This is not a made-up title and if it is that means there's a lawsuit for unauthorized practice of law that hasn't been filed yet.
Nope. I don’t know that you necessarily even need to have passed the bar exam in a given jurisdiction, much less have any kind of actual degree.
IMO, you’d be stupid to take a job like that if you didn’t have the degree and have passed one or more bar exams in the appropriate related jurisdiction(s), but I don’t know that it’s actually required.
You'd need to be licensed to perform the various legal duties one expects of general counsel, but general counsel is not a protected title and thus anyone within the company could be given the title. Musk is right on this one.
Love it. Yeah I find myself mentoring junior engineers, writing code myself, reading documentation on tech I've never worked with before, designing email templates, writing marketing copy, crafting business plans, calculating sweat equity, etc etc. So at the end of the day...tf do titles mean
The funny thing is that I might assume a CEO/CTO at a small startup has less experience than a "Chief Software Architect." My assumption would be that the executives are founders and that there's not a minimum experience requirement for founders.
If you take the stereotypical Silicon Valley style start of 2-4 founders in their 20s or early 30s, someone is gonna be CTO, and there's a good chance they'll have relatively little experience. But a Chief Architect, I'd assume was an experienced early hire rather than a founder.
How long have you been in tech? I'm 41 and have been in tech since I was 17 :) I've been calling myself an Architect but after working with some experienced CTOs.. lets say I now know my value/position. If I ever work for someone else then that's the minimum position I'd take.
I was one of the technical guys on a Danish standardization project called OIO - Offentlig Information Online (offentlig means governmental in this case) - at one time they decided that we needed 'titles', so I and one other guy decided we would call ourselves XML Architects as a piss-take on another part of the project. Got the business cards and everything, but ADHD me lost mine.
When I worked for a bank it was explained to me that early on foreign banks and financial institutions would not take a call from someone other than a VP, so they made all the bankers VP's to get work done. That was probably an over simplification.
Thing is, within the banking industry, these end up being fairly standardized titles. Titles mean less across industries, but within an industry, there's some consistency. In fact in banking, these are more standardized than tech industry titles are.
Typically at banks, the ranks are: analyst, associate, VP, managing director. Everyone eventually gets to VP, so it's not a particularly high level. It's similar to how tech companies have a level everyone is supposed to reach (often "Senior"). So, analyst is an entry-level role, associate is a mid-level role (2yrs experience, or a higher degree), and VP is a terminal role. VP is a wide band, though, so there's often sub-levels within that (whether publicly visible or not): managing director is a very high title at a bank.
I think this is mostly a technical requirement related to signing authority (e.g. for lots of things you need to be an officer).
Of course, the VP being the threshold target role for this is a choice, but it seems to be useful in contexts like banks to have some sort of dividing line.
In banks in engineering it was once explained to me, that dev salaries require a title (in comparison with other staff). Hence ordinary developers are often titled AVP, VP or AD.
My cofounder and I just used “Design Lead” and “Dev Lead” as our titles for nearly a decade - I only reluctantly took the mantle of “CTO” after taking outside investment, as they insisted on grandiosity - said it was amateurish to have small titles whilst employing 50+ people.
oh yeah, this is super true of sales. everyone in your sales org needs absurd titles or nobody will ever speak to them. Just one of those things apparently.
At my current startup, I recommended everyone to hold the title of Research Engineer. I was to be recruited as a Software architect / Principal tech lead, but I chose to keep this title too & suggested the same to my peer & immediate junior. Something good that I learned from Facebook Engineering flat organization structure.
Keeping the hierarchy flatter helped more honest communication. There were lesser inhibitions to talk & express opinion. In any disagreement, experience seniority played the subtle hand to navigate discussion.
This is so very important, as titles can often inhibit information flow.
The only problem with this approach is that people look for other markers of "status" (like, for instance, the amount of time you've been with a company.
Having just taken a job as a l Lead SRE in a large consultancy despite not being skilled or experienced enough I'm terrified that I'll struggle to move to a new org solely because of my job title. It's jarring how much of an impact it has made on me and I don't really know what to do about it.
I'm aware that it's only really a problem when I move but I don't think the work and tech I'll be exposed to will help me reach a level where I'll be confident.
Just rephrase the job title on your resume so it's faithful to reality but not the literal title.
At my last job, my formal title was "Systems Integration Engineer", which has a real industry definition as recognized by various engineering fellowships. Since I did very little formal Systems Integration at the job, I labelled myself as a "Cargo Logistics Engineer" on my resume. It worked fine.
> had to hide her title on her resume when she left because no established firm wanted to hire someone whom they assumed they'd need to pay a quarter million dollars to be competitive
That's bizarre given Wall Street has been abusing the Vice President title for generations now. (VPs at American banks report to Managing Directors, a middle-management level of which there are hundreds if not thousands. It's the tier above Associate, i.e. straight out of B school or with a year or two of Analyst experience.)
The European equivalent is "Executive Director". (That is, someone at Goldman who was promoted to VP from Associate in the US would have been promoted to ED in Europe.) That's even worse title abuse, if you ask me.
My sole stint as a VP was in a thirteen-person startup. I had that title for pseudo-legal reasons, we needed a VP.
My later role as Director of a 50-person engineering group in a 200-person startup was way more relevant in terms of my experience managing development.
I've struggled with that, having been in the same position - I was a "VP" at a six-person startup over ten years ago. Of course, I didn't anything remotely VP-ish there - I was programming computers, same as I've ever done. But, that was my title. So... do I write that on my resume and be honest about my title or write a title that's honest about what I was actually doing?
IMO it's always fine to be creative when listing a past job title, PROVIDED you are trying to provide more accurate information and not deceive. I've had titles that do not at all accurately reflect my day to day, so I list them as something more topical. However I will never portray myself as having more authority nor more day-to-day experience than my title would have otherwise conveyed.
Yes, I never use my official title in the company emails. There were some funny moments in the past when some people thought someone reporting to me was my boss, but it was always funny. These days people in my team have more impressive titles than me, I am totally fine with that.
> She had to hide her title on her resume when she left
An easy fix for that would be to add the number of employees she managed and the size of the company. The title is scary but she did manage people and did report to the CEO, so to me it is a VP position. Of course, that won’t map 1:1 when hiring into a new company (doubt she’ll be reporting to the CEO) but the person she might report to would be managing an org of a similar size to her previous company.
> because no established firm wanted to hire someone whom they assumed they'd need to pay a quarter million dollars to be competitive.
250k total comp (including some equity) doesn’t sound outlandish to me. Very much in the market for someone who had lead experience in her 20’s. Some fresh grads land that out of school.
If you graduate from any top 10 school in the US — which plenty of people do — it is indeed a pretty typical offer
Love how I’m downvoted for pointing out a fact. I mean, for fuck’s sake, look at levels.fyi. And look at how many people FAANG and FAANG-adjacent startups hire every year. It’s really not that rare. But hey, stay in denial.
Yeah but this is less than 1/10 of 1% of the number of people that graduate every year. By the same logic you could say that everyone has trust funds, because most of the people in this small slice have them. Just because something applies to the top 0.1% of the US doesn't mean it applies to the rest of the 99.9%. This is the problem with wealth and opportunity disparity in this country. The haves think that the have nots are in that position due to choice. It's not a choice to be born into poverty.
Georgia Tech is consistently ranked a Top 10 CS program (worldwide) and their OMSCS program now accounts for 10% of all MSCS degrees issued. It costs about 6,000 to 7,000 USD total:
"OMSCS started in January 2014 with 380 students. Enrollment increased each semester (excluding summer terms). In 2019 I believed that we were very close to the peak, since we are graduating more and more students. But then, the pandemic hit and we have kept growing every semester. This spring term we just passed a new mile stone – we have over 12,000 students, 12,016 to be precise. We might be at the peak or very close to it. Apparently, OMSCS is the biggest degree program, online or not in any subject in the US and probably the world. More importantly, the degree is of the same quality of the on campus program. We have 56 courses (we started with 5); several courses now have over 1,000 students. We graduated 1,970 in 2021 for a total of 6,470 so far. We are graduating in a year well over 10% of the number of those that graduate with MS in CS in the US." - Zvi Galil
Looks great on paper but the people you really need to reach don't have undergrad done. Is this one of those rare masters one can complete with no undergrad done?
It’s not a choice to apply yourself and get into a good school? I mean seriously, given how hot the US software market is, there’s no excuse.
And FWIW, I come from a poor immigrant background. My family was on welfare. I got free lunch at school. The American dream come true. Sorry that not everyone can hack it in life.
Exactly my point, folks with privilege like yourself don't even understand what privilege they have and have taken advantage of their whole life.
I did (apply myself). I did work my ass off to get into, and out of, (good) engineering school and pay for it also.
It simply wasn't an option for me to go to an expensive private or out of state school with a price tag of a couple hundred thousand dollars. So I went to the best school I could afford. Many folks are in this boat. It's not for a lack of trying or intelligence - it's for a lack of privilege.
Edit - I also want to acknowledge that compared to many folks in the world I am very privileged. It only serves to highlight my point even further. These statements are less about me personally and more about me recognizing that I, and many others in our HN world are very privileged in one way or another as compared to he average American, or Human.
Please stop using that word. It sucks the life from you because you think it excuses you from self analyzing why you aren't happy where you are. Life is not fair if you are a human, cat, squirrel or mouse. We are born into a specific set of conditions...look around and move but please stop using the word privilege. Everyone and everything is different.
I am very happy where I am. Within myself, I am not blaming anything for lack of anything but rather celebrate my successes and what has come from my hard work.
That doesn't mean I can't recognize that folks are different, and that where we start out most definitely has an impact on how far we go.
I actually agree with this, if only because of the political connotations the term “privilege” has acquired.
I think a better term would be “advantages”. It adequately describes the meaning that’s being conveyed without carrying the implication that it’s necessarily completely outside of the individual’s control.
Just what is it with extra privileged people and being allergic to admitting it.
You seriously, honestly, from the bottom of your heart, think that 90% of the 70k people living in the Complexo do Alemão are just lazy and don't fix their lives due to sloth?
Before you start, I'm happy with my life and my circumstances.
I went to a public in-state school with poor parents. Full need-based financial aid in school. I made 6 figures out of school and currently make the big numbers you claim are impossibly rare.
You claim that not everyone is intelligent enough to make it into these schools in another post but we know from science that even just changing the way you study can improve performance by half a standard deviation [1]. So maybe you just didn't work as hard as the competition? Maybe you didn't look at all the aspects of _how_ you work and do some self-reflection about working more efficiently?
Don't blame intelligence when your own decisions have much more impact on overall performance than 10-20 points of IQ do. Why do you think Asians comprise 50% of school populations where affirmative action is banned? Hint: it's not because of superior intelligence, but work ethic.
Nonsense, you were privileged to be the right kind of "poor", the kind of poor that the system caters to. Just because the system gave you a big hand up does not imply that it does for everyone in equal conditions. You were privileged and you don't even realize it.
There are many poor people that are never given that opportunity regardless of ability. To those people, you had an easy path.
>>> So I went to the best school I could afford. Many folks are in this boat. It's not for a lack of trying or intelligence - it's for a lack of privilege.
and
> But you had the privilege [o]f uncommon intelligence and test taking ability. Not all privilege is money.
Not really. It's not so black and white. My point is that above a certain threshold of GPA/test scores/"intelligence" college is free. If you are below that threshold college is not. For those of us that were below that threshold, for whatever reason, we had to figure out how to pay for it. Within that bucket there are people who's family can just pay for it, no matter how expensive (these are the people going to Harvard and Wharton out of pocket), and there are those who simply can't afford to pay 200k for an education because they don't have it. Those folks then choose state Schools (which I went to and are wonderful). My point is that the average graduate of Wharton has a much higher average starting salary than the average state school. Therefore tying a family's ability to pay more tuition with a graduates average salary being higher.
It's simply the way the world works. The rich get richer.
So just to be clear, you're repudiating your statement that when people can't afford to attend college, that's not for lack of intelligence on their part?
Sorry, where did the "reduction" occur in rephrasing "above a certain intelligence, college is free" to "if you can't afford college, you're missing some intelligence"?
The one is just the logical contrapositive of the other.
Those aren't the same thing, that's where the reduction occurred.
My statement, which is the simple reality of the world, was that top performing students who are able to prove so via grades, test scores and other admissions requirements and scholarship requirements, are able to have top tier educations paid for via scholarships and similar aid. For folks, like me, who weren't in that bucket, have a different set of opportunities and tradeoffs. Those include paying for a 200k "top tier" education if our situation affords it, or the choice I and many others make which is to go to the best state school (or other "affordable") option.
I'm not complaining, it's just how the world works. If you were to create a flow chart for college that covers any input (student), this is what it would look like.
Reducing the above to "college is free above a certain intelligence" is missing the point and focusing on a needless obsurd detail.
Ah yes, after all a lottery winner will advise everyone around them to play lottery - clearly it works, they are the best example.
Once again, you are refusing to acknowledge that the word "typical" is not appropriate here. Even in your example it's not typical for American people to achieve that American dream, as America is absolutely awful on the social mobility scale.
Edit: also it's really classy you are just deleting your replies to my comments instead of actually engaging in a discussion. Your choice I suppose.
Oh I know I have it good. 1% in terms of income. And I come from a really unprivileged background. Uneducated parents, family on welfare. Shit man, we were so poor, I got into college for free based on needs.
Were your parents - I'm quoting you here - "dumb and lazy"? Since they didn't pull themselves bup by the bootstraps like you did, and yet they allegedly had the same opportunities as you.
They did actually, work their way up from where they started. And eventually got to immigrate to America, where opportunities are much better and their kids could thrive. It’s the stereotypical thing where immigrants to this country are much more hardworking and appreciative of the opportunities they have here compared to their home country, versus the native population who doesn’t appreciate just how good they have it in America. I wouldn’t be surprised if my kids turn out that way — it’s just how it is.
I like how the person above can also say the following.
> Why is it nonsense? The wealthy and connected can already give their progeny undue access to opportunities via their social networks, and can afford the best education that money can buy. That's already way more of an advantage than the average citizen gets.
Besides, the whole point is to maximize equality of opportunity.
For computers, not everyone can afford computers in America. I was lucky to find a job walking fields as a child to afford one but that opportunity doesn't exist for everyone.
Spoiler - it's because it's seen by kids. If a kid in Jamaica wants to be a runner it's obvious to them what to do. Its being told to them every day in their sports entertainment, local events, advertising, etc. It a kid in Jamaica wants to be a CS person, they have no clue what to do. No TV ads, local clubs, events, races, all grooming them day by day to he a better programmer. We have that in the US, in the Bay area, etc. We are grooming young STEM folks from the beginning.
The book « The Sports Gene » discusses that the West African heritage of Jamacians actually gives them a genetic advantage. I forget the details but basically, to resist malaria they have sickle cell anemia which leads to powerful anaerobic systems ideal for sprinting.
You could put someone of different genetic stock in the same culture bit they wouldn’t be as successful at sprinting.
>>If you graduate from any top 10 school in the US — which plenty of people do
Yes, and globally that's still nothing. You are talking about the elite of the elite, chosen ones among the chosen ones. In other 1st world countries, and even in majority of USA no, recent graduates are not paid quarter of a million dollars. There's a select, very exclusive, very limited group of people who do. But like others have pointed out already - that's not "typical" by any definition of the word.
I wasn't aware that "elite of the elite" included many public schools that aren't even that difficult to get into. If you're a California resident UCSD, UCI, UCB, UCLA, UCSB are all accessible schools that give you a very solid shot at a FAANG job out of college. If you're a Michigan resident, same goes for UMich. Illinois, UIUC. Georgia, Georgia Tech. Texas, any number of great state schools. These schools are not that difficult to get into. They're also public, so there is no legacy shenanigans happening to boost wealthy applicants.
If you grew up in a shitty high school, you can go to a community college and then transfer to one of these state schools. I know for certain California has excellent policies that favor CC applicants transferring in. There are multiple ways in the door if you apply yourself.
Perhaps consider that a student that can't even get into a state school has no business or ability to write code at a level that would merit a 250k salary. The bar is on the floor.
That was literally me. Went to community college and, as you say, had a much easier time transferring to a UC. I wasn’t even among the smartest graduates in my program — not by a long shot. And yet, opportunities abound.
Like I said, the software engineering job market is red hot right now. I rejected a few offers and they still asked me a few months later if I would be interested in joining. That’s how desperate they are for anyone with even a reasonable amount of talent.
Which again supports the idea that it's about applying yourself and not about privilege or any other excuse that people use to justify their own shortcomings.
Exactly. Even if we take MIT which seems to graduate AT MOST 10,000 students each year -- times 10 (10x)-- it's only 100,000 graduates. The 1 million comes from where?
But we are specifically talking about graduates being paid quarter of a million dollars, so why are you bringing absolute numbers into the mix? Should I compare it against the absolute number of people working everywhere in the world? Because then that million won't be so large suddenly.
If you want to do this properly tell me how many graduates out of all graduates per year get paid quarter of a million dollars when they start. Because it will be such an insignificant number that again - using the word "typical" to describe it will be just delusional.
The Median Income in King County, where you work, is 90k / year. That's absurdly high in this country; but it's still less than HALF what you make. Check yourself.
When a large part of the compensation is stock, it's worth remembering that share prices can go down too.
Meta/FB is down 35% since September. Many public mid-cap software unicorns are down 50%. Smaller companies that IPO'd last year are often down even more than that.
If you joined one of these companies last fall and got a $150k base salary + $400k stock grant that vests over four years, your total compensation was $250k when hired, but is now down to $200k after the stock has lost 50%. Of course the stock price may go up again. (But it also may not, as anyone who lived through 1999-2001 remembers.)
Good point. I mean “typical” as in, entirely expected within a nontrivial portion of the population. Where absolutely nobody would be surprised that you’re making this much.
Is it typical for the general population to make a million a year? No, but it is entirely typical for investment bankers and quants at hedge funds. To say that is atypical of the average worker in America — well, of course, but that isn’t a very meaningful statement when you’re specifically discussing people in investment firms. And that’s what this article is about — the subset of the population for which this is entirely normal and expected.
You realize rarity is referencing the relative percentage of an event or item and not the absolute number right? If you have 1 million people in the numerator, but 100 million in the denominator, then the rate is pretty rare
Those salaries are only possible, because most of it is stock compensation, highly inflated due to the biggest stock market bubble of the last 30 years.
As of next week, as soon as the Fed starts raising rates, the stock market will crater. These compensation values will then become what companies are really willing to pay. Not much different from other parts of the world.
If you factor in the risk of bankruptcy in the US due to unexpected medical bills
and that you have to be on the 0.1% of Developer pools in the US, does not make it so amazing.
GP said quarter mil was typical of new grads (unqualified), not typical of elite new grads. A glance at BLS data shows that's multiples of the median wage in software.
It is highly likely that the former vice president of a startup is actually from one of those two small corners of the US (given that these also seem to be hot startup scenes), so it isn't a weird assumption for senior roles (not new grad ones). It isn't mentioned if she is a SWE or not, however, which would make a huge difference.
Incorrect. The tax code makes this kind of an offer an exception rather than a rule. There's a reason why Amazon just now upped the top $ into 300k range. That's also a reason why most of astronomical cash salaries are done as B2B via pass through entities.
The vast majority of people talking about those salaries just heard of a few people that make that money and extrapolated to the rest.
Sure, if you want to get specifically technical about it. The overall gist of what the OP was talking about is still true. At most, you could say they’re slightly exaggerating, and should reword to “It’s not at all unusual for new college grads to make $250k a year.”
I don’t think it’s overly specific. New grads out of college are a mostly unknown value that is measured using proxies like GPA and pedigree. After 2 years of employment you’ve shown what value you can bring or have been removed from the employer.
As someone who has hired a new grad into a “Senior Engineer” role, it meant the title of the salary band that met the candidate’s salary requirements to make our offer competitive with the other offers he received.
We wanted to hire a junior role since our team was already relatively senior. But the company’s salary bands were not at all competitive for entry-level developers. So we classed the new hire as senior to make it work.
Some companies’ policies are stupid and inflexible and engineers would rather just work around the problem than having to fight against HR.
I'm running a hiring competition right now for a "Senior." The pay band is less than what entry level startups pay. So we rotate through a never ending stream of kids who leave for better salaries because we don't have any higher levels.
Sometimes we do get lucky and pick up a mediocre lifer (like me) so HR sees no incentive to change.
Never take a job for a company where you are not on the value chain!
Because not everyone feels the need to rate their self-worth by how much wealth they’ve hoarded. I’m already set for retirement and I have my house nearly paid off. I’m comfortable and I don’t make $250,000 a year. I barely work more than 32 hours a week and I just got promoted. Full time work from home with a free working trip back to my old stomping grounds to catch up with friends twice a year.
Why would I break my psyche with burnout, stress, and work I despise just to make someone else exponentially more money so I can make marginally more money I don’t need? Miss me with that hustle porn, thanks.
Set for retirement can mean different things. Personally, I run the rat race so that I can retire as soon as possible. Few people actually fit the bill of “self worth = wealth hoarded.”
Maybe he bought a house in the neighborhood. Maybe he really likes writing COBOL. Maybe his spouse works there as well. Maybe he is simply extremely risk averse.
There are a number of good reasons somebody might decide to stay put, even if it might be more lucrative or exciting elsewhere.
I worked at a company where there were lots of managers, directors, and coordinators. And just as many people under them. When I reached the top of my band I had to hire someone. Not because there was more work that needed to be delegated but because I had to move up to the next title "manager" and needed at least 1 person to manage.
Prospects, if they can overcome the flattery of being offered a title beyond their skill and experience, should actually recognize such as a warning sign. After all, a company willing to do such a thing is likely a place full of stupid and inflexible policies where HR has too much power.
Sorry you have to play such games to get decent talent, but beware a nasty side effect: your actual senior engineers are going to need new titles to reflect the peer group they actually belong to. They may be (and perhaps rightly so) insulted by the insinuation that a new graduate is equally valuable to the company.
Sometimes it means “someone who can bill $300 an hour” with no relation to actual ability. I was a “senior” three years out of college and I had no clue what in the world I was doing.
Come to think of it after 20 years I kinda still feel that way.
I have demonstrated my ability to convince clients to pay amounts of money like this for my skills. And yes, the not-so-secret thing about consulting is that if you're able to convince a client that you're worth $500 an hour, it's just easy to convince them to pay $300 an hour for the work of a colleague of yours they've never seen.
Ugh, I encountered this a few times early in my career (early 2000s.) The worst case was a team from a large, expensive, high-end consulting company. There was one A player who was fast and sharp and absolutely invaluable, two developers who were slow but diligent, one guy who everybody avoided because he was pissed off that he wasn't as smart as the A player, and one engineer who spent all day in front of an IDE but never checked in any code. Once, as a prank, a couple of my coworkers sent me over to "help" this last person (to be clear, the prank was on both me and the person I was sent to help.) They were staring at code that was just syntactically wrong, and not in a subtle way. It was a Java source file, and the line that they were working on, which I think was the only line they had changed, did not look like Java. They couldn't see what was wrong with it, and honestly neither could I, in the sense that I could only see that it didn't look like Java. This person had been "working" on the project for several weeks, and from that point on, I felt intensely sorry them, because they came to work every day for eight hours, and sat in a chair looking at an IDE, going to meetings, staying late if the A player stayed late, etc., nobody ever talking to them, and I can't imagine what kind of bizarre hell that was for them. I didn't feel comfortable talking to them about it because there was an age and culture and language gap, so I'll never know. When the consulting' contract was up, we renewed, but that person was replaced with another slow but diligent worker, and I never saw them again.
god.. that hurts. I've worked 10 years in the industry, have rescued code bases and currently am lead engineer and cto of a startup. I've tried doing some moonlighting but people balk when I quote them $80/hr.
I really need a better network. plus my soft skills are terrible.
The good news is, soft skills are just skills. If you can learn JavaScript you can learn how to build relationships, or give a presentation. I know this because my soft skills used to be non-existent and now I give talks, workshops, have a podcast, and _even_ do stand up comedy.
This free course from a podcaster I listen to helped _a lot_ jordanharbinger.com/course. "Networking" is just a serious of small habits you do daily, there's zero rocket science involved. This book written by my speaking coach was a game changer for me too: https://bookyourselfsolid.com/
You hit the nail on the head though. The high rates come from relationships. Period. You don't _get_ the good gigs, you _earn_ them by providing 10x value to every client you work with and getting warm reviews from them.
I do zero machine learning, have no masters degree, and never passed any whiteboard code interview. But there's plenty of people who just need someone competent, dependable, and friendly to make their website work. Best of luck :)
While I think impostor syndrome is real, I also can't believe that so many actually have it (judging from media mostly). I cannot personally relate either. I can relate with insecurity, anxiety and so on _very_ much. But much of that has been based on a lack of experience, practice and knowledge. When those things can heal "impostor syndrome" then it's not impostor syndrome - you'd still have it.
There is also a thing that comes up after more experience rather than less: "nobody has a clue what they're doing"-syndrome.
The idea or realization that real competence or knowledge is a fad in the first place. Everyone just tries really hard to figure stuff out, but nobody _really_ achieves that. There's confidence, good communication and so on, but those things are orthogonal to what I'm describing. And I include very smart and capable people here. In the end it's all based on a "wishy-washy, good enough, it works so far, those are my assumptions" kind of deal.
Not everything is impostor syndrome. Much of it is some version of any of the above, or just plain humbleness.
The more advanced you are in your career, the more your job should be to solve novel problems. Things you, at least, haven't solved before. Preferably things nobody has solved before.
If all you're doing is work you already know how to do, you should find a more interesting job imo.
In the context of 'IT Consulting Companies,' which the blog post is about, it means that clients are paying a higher billable rate than for more 'junior' staff.
I have worked in consulting, and internally, the above was pretty-much our definition of "senior" that we used to determine who was billed out at "senior rates:" The engineers who also had customer-facing skills and coördination skills and understanding the customer's byzantine constraints skills and so forth.
Those who focused on just coding were billed out for less than those who spent time in meetings and writing words.
I was made "senior developer" three months out of university for exactly this reason. It helped that I also knew what I was doing, but the whole 1st dotcom bubble was a crazy time.
When I read "senior" I often interpret it as "has a lot of experience" which has nothing to do with skill. Speaking for myself who has a shit ton of experience in a lot of tools, techniques, languages and so on but is SHIT in most of them. I'd be hired before a lot of better candidates based on my years of experience in the area but not because of my skill in the area.
Looking at many job posts senior means capable of using React and capable of talking about, but not necessarily using, TypeScript. When senior sounds like faster junior I really have trouble finding what actually differentiates a senior from a junior at these organizations.
It's quite common in larger companies for "senior" to actually mean "mid-level" or "not junior".
This title inflation provides some flexibility to create a level below the new grad level, to hire people from non-traditional backgrounds who would otherwise fail a typical entry level screening but are willing to (temporarily) work for low $ to get themselves on the "engineering ladder".
It also makes new grad offers cosmetically/psychologically more competitive. All else being equal, if company A offers you "junior software engineer" and company B offers you "software engineer" you might favor the latter.
id agree with these points, but argue its an everything kind of package that comes within the first year of someone hiring on.
whenever I help hire a senior-level engine mechanic or technician for a shop, I need to know they can do the work without a lot of supervision. I also need to know theyll resolve the issues on the shop floor and be able to communicate those issues to a customer as well as a greenhorn tech straight out of a brake shop without chewing them up if its their fault. They need to have the ability to delegate things, get along with people and get the job done.
most of all, i dont need the team to see "a new senior mechanic just got hired." I need the team to see a new mechanic and form a consensus that she is senior based on their walk, not my talk. in that first year ill spend more time in the break room sucking down folgers and listening, or just walking the floor stocking ear plugs and soap dispensers and waiting to see what they do.
We try to map some of these titles across different companies with Levels.fyi
We also normalized some of the scope and responsibility definitions for software engineering levels based on what we've seen through company leveling rubrics that we collect: https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html
In my job, I was able to get a position just as "Software Developer." I didn't like devaluing "Software Engineer" and I didn't want to be seen as a WordPress guy if I used "Web Developer." (My job is web development with Laravel.) And lastly, I didn't want to be called "Junior" (because I have less than 5 years experience).
I think I started going to interview customers with my boss very early on my first job in the 90s. I've been given a team to manage after two years and I started doing interviews, analysis, requirements, etc on my own. Basically I was a senior engineer by then. The company was always very supportive so if I had to ask for advice I had somebody to ask to. After all 1/n-th of my boss' career depended by the outcome of my job.
Of course I'm much better at that kind of job now. I wonder how I could really understand my customers but obviously it was good enough.
My very first job even before I graduated was 'Senior' (not a brag, an indication that the title doesn't mean much.) Mid-level individual contributors at Goldman Sachs are 'Vice President'. These titles can't be read literally, can't be quantified, and can't be compared between companies. Any attempt to do so is futile.
I think what is important is once to have seen couple of times the happy path (successful project) and at least the unhappy path (unsuccessful project) and see how a senior can mitigate the repercussion of the unsuccessful project. Basically see the stuff which no book tells you.
> While I certainly don't approve of these practices, I'm also not saying that these companies are only evil. I view that they serve a very strong need in some corners of the system, like a coding bootcamp for the less fortunate.
Absolutely not. I was in college for CS/CE, dropped out during an economic crisis, joined the military, and had to work my way through technician, network engineer, systems engineer, DevOps, SRE, and finally I am a very senior SWE. That was over a decade long journey and has made quite an impact on how I've lived my life.
I didn't lie to get jobs or interviews, I didn't embellish. Instead I had to research what was being done with my resume, I had to work with third-party recruiters, I had to write letters to hiring managers to get interviews. The people that are the subject of this article had the privilege to go to and finish college, that is your free pass. You don't get to cheat the job market just because you think you deserve it.
If you can't tell, I'm incredibly frustrated reading this post.
Edit: I do feel for people who have a lack of opportunity. I was there, I lived it, I felt it. That said, it's certainly not the only emotion I connect with when reading this story.
First, I hear ya. But I don't feel he's described his colleagues well enough for me to have your convictions. I can tell that even in reading it, I'm dropping into the roles the sorta people I grew up with. And that gives me my own sense of the slippery slope.
For some people there's no path. Military service (USA or Euro or whatever) is a great catch-all that many people use to braid their own bootstraps, and I'm happy you had it, but many people don't have that luxury. I'm not saying it wasn't brutal work and commitment, but access to the ability to DO hard work (with rewards instead of extraction) is often luxury.
Some people need to hustle more, and that usually means being scrappy. I feel for your perspective because I've been on your side, criticizing the tactics of extended family from other cultures. It didn't go well, and I've since learned that what some families need to do to survive and succeed looks very different from what I might assume is right. I don't like it; I don't do it; I don't want it to be that way; but I can't dismiss it.
My reaction was feeling really bad for the students/apprentices/whatever they are, who seem to me clearly in a terrible situation with few options and being exploited.
Thank you for sharing and I think your opinion is certainly valid and it would create more trust if everyone shares your principles. I was just trying to convey this idea that they are there because they serve a need. If we want to imagine a world without these practices, we should probably start by tackling the system itself, not by attacking the surface level actors only.
I wish the world would've been that charitable to me. Instead, had I failed I'd be a +1 on another DOD statistic. I wouldn't have even registered in turnover for most software companies. Nobody would've missed the SWE without a degree beyond my friends. There are few, if any, DEI dashboards that would've tracked a SWE without a degree or an enlisted veteran.
On one hand, I hate that people seek accountability so much from individuals. I think individual decisions are so low level most of the time that it makes seeing the bigger picture very difficult, if not impossible. On the other hand, this story is the antithesis of my professional life, and the very principles that may have projected my career also did damage to my personal life because of the focus they demanded. I know what's lost and that makes reading about someone who just wanted more than what they were already given so hard to read.
Edit: I do feel for people who have a lack of opportunity. I was there, I lived it, I felt it. That said, it's certainly not the only emotion I connect with when reading this story.
Honest question: why didn't you use the GI bill to get free college? If you were in and have the "post-9/11" bill (most veterans do if they were in the military at any point in the past 20 years) then you could get a monthly allowance and free college at many good state universities. Most universities will accept any veteran who has a GED or HS diploma, regardless of grades, as long as they take the SAT or ACT (ACT is easier, IMO) and score above the absolute minimum. Universities love the guaranteed VA money!
I, for instance, paid my way through 3 years of college using the GI bill, and the monthly allowance I got paid for my apartment and food and etc. for the whole 3 years. I had to go during summers, too, to get the allowance, but I finished a whole math degree during that time. I also got medical coverage from the VA during that time, though that might have been because I'm a certain percentage disabled veteran (I am not sure if VA healthcare is included with the GI bill?).
Maybe now you're all set and don't need it, but I find it alarming how many veterans never use the benefits they earned in their service.
> why didn't you use the GI bill to get free college?
I did. I went back for a semester, but the money wasn't enough in my area. I found myself working part time and going to school full time, then eventually doing both full time. The stress got to me and I dropped out again.
> Most universities will accept any veteran who has a GED or HS diploma
Maybe now, but this is not true as far as my experience goes. The only college that would take me at the time was a community college. I assume this is because I had dropped out mid-semester before. Some context, I was in the DEP and was selected early, so I left with about a weeks notice (This was 2009). When I applied to four year universities I was rejected fairly quickly.
> I find it alarming how many veterans never use the benefits they earned in their service.
Same, however, I think there's tell-tale signs of why.
Loss in institutional trust is one:
- The VA provides pretty abysmal care in most places with long waiting lines and subpar coverage. I, up until recently, have been missing a tooth that they extracted in-service and told me the VA would replace with an implant. They would never agree to finishing the work the Navy started.
- I've also had the VA fight with me over what bills need to be covered under disability and which I needed to pay for, with them pursuing my tax return at one point (When I really needed that money.)
- Proving disability with the VA was litigious. Around they time I gave up they started demanding I show up at some court in Waco, TX which was hours from where I lived. If I went to an outside doctor, I needed to have cash to cover whatever they wanted to do because the VA would frequently protest paying my medical bills - even at VA locations.
Another is the lack of post-service programs. I really needed help getting my life back on track, dealing with issues in mental health, etc -- these services were either sparse or did not exist where I was at the time. In the military I was given a week long course called "Seps & TAPS".
Last, and maybe not least, I was exhausted. I spent a total of a year in country and returned to civilianhood right around a year after I got back. Having to go to school full time and having to make up for what the Post 9/11 GI Bill wasn't covering wore me to the bone, along with dealing with the VA - who would always insist I skipped work to come see them.
That's horrible and I feel for your struggle. I've gotten lucky to be able to navigate the VA very easily, or I had good guides when I was separating and filing for disability and other separation concerns. I was in the Navy as well, but I was always in non-combat zones so I was lucky my disability was not related to combat injuries. I wish I could do something about the VA, but alas I'm not a powerful person or politician, so I can only gripe and complain about people I've known who went through shitty situations.
I was in the Marines, but my medical care was entirely provided by the Navy, with a few exceptions.
I'm not sure what to do about the VA. I gave up using it and any passive improvements they've made will not be enough, in my mind, to make me a customer again. The VA isn't the only problem, imo, though - really the problem is societal. People will give lip service and outrage to these problems, others will decry any form of action or empathy as hero worship. Basically, veterans became both aliens and political chess pieces to larger society. We have the reputation of being ghosts, in the form of never speaking about our pasts, and it allows people to make up mythology about us and our struggles.
My way of combating this, is sometimes I'll share "war stories", but they're usually funny ones. The real war stories I share are the stories of me coming back, where I'm not wearing a uniform anymore. Mundane stories about mental health, substance abuse, lack of opportunity, medical problems, etc are what the public really needs to hear; lest they get to thinking you're just a bum.
There's more to these "shops" than meets the eyes: frequently there's also immigration fraud happening. These "consultancies" will make sure someone can qualify for X years of "relevant experience" so they can qualify for a visa (sponsored by said shop).
I wouldn’t be surprised if some people actually paid for the training and visa sponsorship. That’s of course illegal but how will they find out about a “debt” held to a loan shark in a foreign country?
I've been involved in hiring decisions on teams I've been part of for a long time now. Blatant plagiarism, obvious embellishments and more subtle BS is literally part of the game unfortunately. This is particularly prevalent when dealing with (almost) any consultancy, large and small.
I will not specifically call out names, but the some of the largest and most well known consultancies do this as a matter of practice after they overbook themselves for projects for which they do not have staff on the bench to fill.
It's sad, but honestly the prevalence of these practices (and perhaps growth of them?) only makes the genuine among us more valuable. Those who actually posses technical talent and experience will be needed more and more by companies who get burned by the frauds. Onward and upward I guess.
I strongly disagree with this framing. There is no "game". There are just the actions of the individual players. Yes, in some sense, lying is part of the "game" in that some players will do it.
But extending that to saying "it's part of the game" implies that all players must use those moves, which is absolutely false. It also implies that you are morally excused from doing so because you didn't choose to lie, you were just obliged to by the rules of the "game".
A core concept behind something being a "game" is that it exists in a morally isolated sandbox. You can't be a good or bad person based on which legal moves you make in a game of chess. The whole point is to create an environment where you are able to play freely largely unencumbered by the social consequences of your moves.
Hiring is the exact opposite of a game. Every move has significant stakes, moral implications, and long term consequences on the entire field.
I have never lied on a resume and I would massively lose respect for anyone who did. They are doing something wrong and they should feel bad for it. The fact that other people do it doesn't excuse the act any more than the existence of litterers makes it OK to throw your trash out the window.
How about this framing: It's part of a game that I've seen being played throughout my career in tech (software development).
I am in no way advocating for that type of behavior. I'm merely pointing out that it exists, it seems to be a game to some and that those who choose a more genuine path can benefit from the follies of those others, however unfortunate that might be.
It seems we are in agreement, though perhaps you interpreted my words differently than I had hoped people would.
> A core concept behind something being a "game" is that it exists in a morally isolated sandbox
This is interesting; if true, what of game theory's seat at the core of many notions of strategy as deployed for explicitly moral purposes?
Also, anecdotally, I've seen pretty good results putting some campy, tongue in cheek acknowledgement that I'm not playing games in the resume/cover letter space where these alleged "rules of the game" might otherwise dictate meaningless boilerplate should go
Some employers seem to appreciate honesty and a reluctance to bullshit
"Game" gets used to analyze human behavior a couple of unrelated ways.
Game theory as a branch of mathematics is about analyzing adversarial and potentially limited knowledge systems. It is unrelated to whether some theoretical game is embedded in any particular social or moral system. You can look at dating, the voting patterns of the United Nations, and poker all under the lens of game theory even though the former two wouldn't generally be considered "games".
Unrelated to that, over in the world of "ludology" or game studies and game development, people discuss what it means for a certain system to "be a game" or "not be a game". Likewise, they discuss what makes an activity "play" versus "not play". Why do we feel some moves are "play-like" and others aren't. What defines our notion of fair play? What is sportsmanship? What is cheating? Where is the line between the game and the metagame?
I'm using "game" in the second sense here, which I think applies. When people say something "is a game", often what they are implying is that "all legal moves are fair play". But I think that value statement is only morally justifiable in an environment that is actually game-like. And for a social system to be game-like in that way means that everyone participating has agreed to the rules of the game and accepts that all moves are fair play.
GP is making up definitions for concepts in ways that make no sense. denying the existence of games because you find them morally reprehensible doesn't change the fact of their existence.
of course games are executed with moral repercussions. if anything, that's really the point of games. they are simplified, yes, but not amoral.
if anything, most "amoral" or "apolitical" games are widely implemented hegemonic tools.
Yeah, games seem to circumscribe morality in a particular context, maybe in ways that allow us to explore certain moral questions, or (to your latter point) ignore others
Feel free not to engage in this practice if it offends your moral sensibilities, but you will be at a disadvantage if you do. Experienced resume readers are aware of the amount of self-aggrandizement that goes on, and your modest and truthful claims would be subject to the same amount of skepticism as everyone else's.
> Feel free not to engage in this practice if it offends your moral sensibilities, but you will be at a disadvantage if you do.
I think one could argue that all moral sensibilities exist to place one at an individual short term disadvantage in return for potentially better longer term or community level outcomes. We don't need moral codes to get us to be immediately self-serving—our natural self interest takes care of that. It's like the old joke that if there was a shortcut that always worked, it wouldn't be called a "shortcut", it would just be The Way.
>It's sad, but honestly the prevalence of these practices (and perhaps growth of them?) only makes the genuine among us more valuable.
I wish this were the case, but I don't think it's true. On the one hand, real, proven experts do get called in to fix these phonies' messes. On the other, often these people succeed often enough that it devalues our labor as a whole. Finally, if employers cannot determine real experts from fake, then it means they won't pay real experts their full worth (eg 'full worth' of 100k, 5% chance it's a fake = pay of 95k).
These costs of lower trust show up elsewhere, but they are hard to quantify and make everyone's life worse.
You bring up a good point...the overall pull downward that the phonies bring to our field. Businesses trust (software) engineering teams less. Perhaps overall industry pay rates are brought down, too, though I don't have personal experience or knowledge about that.
However, that point you make about the 'proven experts' getting called in is where my original (and perhaps overly broad) comment came from. If you can align yourself with the industry as one of those fixers, and then actually deliver on that promise, there is immense value to capture. If you can carefully build a small team of people that can do this regularly, there is even more value to capture and share with people who actually deserve it.
If they succeed then aren't they an acceptable fit for the role? If it devalues the role then that means the job isn't as demanding as the title makes it seem.
Yeah that would be great is success meant "sound engineering that meets the requirements and is delivered on time without generating friction with stakeholders or adding unneeded complexity". Unfortunately on some companies that don't actually ship much of what gets engineered success means "we got to the next financing round" or "our skills got noted by upper management so we are still allowed to hang around". Bad engineers survive in the last two environments and at the same time stockpile credentials about how many years they were senior at Google or Lyft or whatever, but they really can't actually engineer anything most of the time.
The definition of 'success' varies. If you mean 'completed the project on time with decent quality' -> then no, that doesn't happen as often as with tried and true experts.
When I said 'success' I meant: 'achieved a basic level of competency after bungling one or several projects, often with unknown or unquantifiable bugs and then move onto the next company / role with few consequences'.
More succinctly: caused harm to others/ project and still got a paycheck.
some of the largest and most well known consultancies do this as a matter of practice after they overbook themselves for projects for which they do not have staff on the bench to fill
Been my experience your regular software org does something very similar. Who among us hasn’t had to drop an entire epic’s worth of work to go spin up some MVP (that eventually becomes a bug-riddled production shitstorm) of a component because a claim got made on a sales call that “we’ve been working on it for weeks” and a promise got made that “we could have a demo ready to go just for you by the end of the quarter”? Because you’re “the senior”.
Not saying it’s the norm.
Just that it happens probably more than it should.
My response is. You lied not me, and I know how many recruiters emailed me this week and you don't. Please don't play those games, I am here because I want to be. Lies make me not want to be.
Yeah I'm replaceable, but the pain of that replacement is usually more than the pain of making a sales guy eat some crow.
I’ll call Infosys out. I’ve worked with people from there who literally did not know how to program. They were moved off quickly. There are some solid people there but hard to find in my experience.
Akvelon consultants have been consistently better than some FTEs in my experience.
The dirty secret in the industry is that there is a gigantic shortage of devs that can do something or anything. And the clients just don't want to pay the rates that help make that shortage go away. They all want it on the cheap and are spoiled by fancy "SAAS" salesmen that "magically" solve all their problems for "$30-$500" a month, because their SAAS is always the answer.
Literally sitting with a client right now that has gone through at least 5 different CRM systems, each time paying a 3rd party boutique marketing agency to "set it up and migrate it" for them (along with some new ad-campaign software). 3 different attempts at a data warehouse (because they have a gazillion disparate white label and SAAS products in their company with no access to any of the data) and someone told them they need a "Data Warehouse Cluster", when they barely have 20k users. I could rant for hours because the industry is broken.
Oh, and they literally blank stare you in the face as you explain things genuinely with detail and care, and then turn around saying they'll just "consult with their marketing agency" to get their advice. But hey, let's all blame "consulting" companies because they try make something useful using the bottom of the barrel devs. *Not defending Infosys or Accenture and their like, though, fully agreed there.
It is not just them and it is a game everyone plays, including their clients. I had several engagements with them on various projects, we had to use them because the internal headcount was limited, while for external suppliers there was no limit, so we had up to 5 external people for every of ours. Most of these kind of companies behave the same, we had small specialized suppliers that provided good quality and value for the work, but the companies on a comment below are all in the same bucket of garbage.
Because it's not only Infosys, there is a whole industry of selling underskilled labour for the cheap.
I haven't worked with Infosys, but I have with other four companies providing similar services, and they all do the same.
It's extremely frustrating, because the budget folks only look at the bottom line and would sign contracts with any of these firms, leaving hiring managers with the responsibility of taking subpar consultants in.
> I will not specifically call out names, but the some of the largest and most well known consultancies do this as a matter of practice after they overbook themselves for projects for which they do not have staff on the bench to fill.
Infosys, TCS & Accenture comes up immediately to my mind.
There are hardworking people in these companies no doubt. Many times it gives an opportunity to the less fortunate as well. In general, however their workforces are poorly trained & business practices borderline unethical (The good ones quickly leave). These companies pay peanuts to their employees, and most of the latter are sticking for the promise of an onsite deployment. There are horrid tales of client having to lock horns with the TCS/Infosys service manager to get the contracted job done.
Case in point: managers at a Japanese giant are shaking their head in frustration since they are locked-in to a Infosys contract. No way they can shake them off due to poor project documentation & shaky installations which require heavy service & maintenance. Choosing an alternative would bring in a tidal wave of expenses, so keeping the status quo. It is deeply unfortunate that they bill their clients higher for the same shoddy work culture as the number of years roll-by. I assume this will continue as long as the cost of renegotiated contracts are lesser than switching to a different firm, or the tech stack is rewritten for a newer project.
When I was interviewing developers from a very large offshoring firm, they covertly had an account manager listening in to take down the questions for future candidates. Each interview, I'd ask a slightly different variation and it became obvious what was going on when a candidate gave a textbook answer to the question I'd asked the previous candidate, including references to tables I hadn't mentioned and that had no purpose in the problem I presented them.
Also had an incident where I interviewed one person but am pretty sure someone different showed up and was completely clueless about the most basic tasks. Within a week I think they figured out that I was onto them and made some excuse to quit about taking a contract closer to home.
Honestly, at this point many American companies have an office of their own offshore, and it's generally considered more prestigious and better condensated to work for those companies directly, so I assume there's close to zero talent left in the large outsourcers.
Large outsourcing companies are not really hired for talent (at least not from what I saw in the investment banking world).
They're hired as scapegoats, and attached to an already failed project. Then they're publically blamed for the failure, while the actual guy responsible gets away with murder (and maybe even hops into a new internal role with better pay).
If I was to rename the consulting/outsourcing industry, I would probably call it the "professional scapegoat" industry.
Indian offshoring companies like Wipro, TCS, etc pay $500 per month for fresh graduates from the engineering colleges, where lecturers are incompetent. In a team of 10, only two are capable, all others are for billable hours for these companies. Some of these newbies can learn and improve skills and jump to other companies in a couple of years.
In the end, what matters is the cheapest labor, and billable hours. Account managers are judged on how much profit they bring.
I presume something must have caused you to start giving slightly different questions, right? You did so because you wanted to see if they were collaborating in this fashion.
What was that "something," if you don't mind me asking?
I generally like to base my interview questions on the candidate's resume, asking questions of various levels of difficulty about the areas they claim to be skilled. I find it gives a better sense of their abilities than strictly asking about the tools/languages/algorithms being used on the hiring project. As such, each interview was already unique to an extent - and I might have noticed something like a person whiffing the easy questions but then getting an advanced one that didn't add up.
Also, the "architect" I inherited on the team seemed totally incompetent in a variety of ways, and insisted on using a fixed set of questions without deviation. To He kept flagging people through who seemed totally inept when I'd dive into their background, so they was also probably a tip off that they figured him out.
The apartment mentioned in the article stirred up some memories.
Back in the early 90's, I worked for a company that had a long term contract for software development and support in another city. The team that worked on that project would rotate up and stay in an apartment that the company maintained there. While I never worked on the project and never saw the apartment, I heard many tales about it, which indicated that it was terrible. Too small, non-functioning amenities, just an utter dive. The team that worked there would just grouse about it to other devs, but never said anything to management, because they assumed they were just being cheap.
Well, someone finally mentioned it (probably during an exit interview) and management was shocked. They had been paying top dollar for what they thought was a luxury apartment, and instead were getting ripped off. I think they wound up getting a different, better apartment for the devs.
This is another reason that, while I understand people’s complaints, I still believe CS interviews should include algorithmic and whiteboard tests. I know they may seem “outdated” or “irrelevant” to some, and yes, it is very unlikely that you will need to implement Dijkstra’s algorithm by hand without any reference, but it is more that it shows a general competence in computing which will transfer to other, more relevant areas. Also, another key insight to whiteboarding is whether you can recognize the fundamental nature of the problem as an instance of another problem, which is essential to CS since the entire field is about solving problems efficiently.
Funnily enough in my career, whenever I took a job after an algorithm and whiteboard test, I would find myself doing the most basic CRUD applications whereas when I interviewed in a more humane way, by talking and exploring the knowledge set I bring to the table, I ended up working with cool algorithms in some highly technical areas.
You mean you're not constantly balancing binary trees and implementing your own bubble sort algorithms? I figured from interviews that this is 95% of what engineers at SaaS companies are doing.
>since the entire field is about solving problems efficiently.
The entire theoretical CS field yes. In the practical field of CS engineering, this is only a subset of the useful competences and a small one at that. Communication, working as part of team, reliability, ability to look up and learn things you don't currently know, caring about the state of the code you write, mentoring others, being able/willing to push for things you believe can be done better (not just in terms of algorithm, but processes affecting the entire business) etc. are all as important.
I would much rather hire someone that sucks in algos/data structure, but is fairly good on all those other points than the opposite.
So yes, whiteboarding can be useful to assess how a candidate is doing on one of the specific skills that are useful for a CS engineer, but if 50% to 90% of your hiring decision is based on that, just like it is in FANGs today, you have an inadequate hiring process IMHO.
For the average SDE job. If your job is to implement and optimize a compiler, then sure it's extremely important.
I used to have a co-worker exactly like you describe. He was great for consulting business: the clients liked him him so much that they hired two additional consultants. One to fix everything that he broke and another to do the job he was supposed to do and took credit for.
* You also used to have many other coworkers that weren't very good at whiteboarding, since even very good engineering teams in FANGS have many people like that, and that didn't have that problem since you specifically said you had one occurence of that.
So hear me out: maybe there isn't a single predictor that you can just automatically throw at interviewees, like a hard leet code problem, and hope that it will magically filter out the very best engineers for you to pick from. Maybe you should have an interview process that test the different areas I mentioned proportionally to what the actual job you are recruiting for requires.
I'm a firm believer that you should include them, if they are part of the job. If not, especially if they're completely unrelated, then they're just a reason somebody is going to have a harder time passing your interview. If you want that, that's your prerogative, but generally IMHO you should focus on finding owners, people who are going to give it their best to provide quality and love their code/contribution. Whether they know how to rock from day one, or they're going to learn it on the job.
It's not an easy thing to look for, I know, but it's what we should be striving towards IMHO and what I'm focusing on. So far it has had great results, with a few misses, but a better success rate than just handing out technical stuff.
If I hire you, I'm going to be a lot more interested if you know how to get a backtrace for every thread in a process than if you can whiteboard Dijkstra's algorithm. I'm going to be a lot more interested if you know anything the issues with denormals and use of -ffast-math than any of your familiarity with sorting algorithms (which will no doubt exceed mine). I'm going to be a lot more interested in whether you understand how to iterate over a utf8 string than your understanding of how to construct an AST and use it.
I worked in a (good) CS department for 4.5 years. They did not teach programming skills to anyone. Most (not all, but most) of the jobs you might be hired to do require far more from the programming skills area than the "computer science" area. People coming out of that program (even at the PhD level) often didn't not even understand how to use a debugger!
It really depends on what kind of developer you're looking for. In the web applications I've worked on, knowledge of application architecture and experience with linux trumps anything I learned in a college course.
Based on my experience, theory problems on white boards is about as useful as dropping a CUPs automation problem on unsuspecting interviewees.
Build me a CUPs driver that drops pdf into in folder in 15 minutes or less. Without documentation.
Bonus points if you can ask if you can skip that bullshit and install and configure an existing a package.
Note: I'm a senior developer with at least a decade of experience. I don't just slap two libraries together. If you want to have fun, dig into how macOS sandboxes CUPs. My bash scripts were not happy.
Agree on what you said. Whiteboard tests on textbook algorithms is a really efficient *and* lazy way of objectively testing a candidate's abilities. The nature of the questions will prevent the interviewer from mistakenly getting impressed by hyperbole.
That said, I do understand why people complain about algorithm questions -- it's undeniably a good filter if you have a large pool of candidates (and a reasonable predictor of ability), but it's mostly irrelevant to most software jobs today since you can usually import textbook algorithms as OSS modules.
The "correct" but harder way to interview is to tailor the interview questions to your actual requirements. This is much more involved and it requires the interviewers to divert attention from whatever they're working on just to set the problems. Setting a problem that's at the right difficulty level and evaluates the right set of skills precisely tailored to the team's needs is hard. (I don't think most typical software engineers have the chops to do this, even experienced senior ones.)
So it's kinda understandable that everyone just randomly picks something from leetcode and use that instead. It's probably not so much a failure of the software industry on the recruiting side, but more of a symptom of how we have failed to come up with skills, tricks, standards and practices that everyone actually agrees on. (eg. it's mostly fruitless to determine whether a candidate is hire-worthy with a question like "would you use Javascript to implement a backend system?") At least the algorithm questions are objectively agreed to be true (even if possibly irrelevant) by everyone and is actually part of most CS cirricula...
Knowing Dijkstra's algorithm off the top of your hand doesn't show a general competence in computing. It shows that you've memorised Dijkstra's algorithm and can get through leetcode "problems". Does the person you're hiring need this knowledge to do their daily job? If not, then you shouldn't be wasting your time questioning them about it.
I remember when I was in high school, I had some friends who studied karate, and they were like, "I finally made it to black belt." Meaning, they were a master now. They were 16 years old, and had maybe 3 years experience. In Taiwan, in the 1890s... uh, they would not be regarded as black belt.
Even then it was clear that there was a lot of "belt inflation" happening. The karate schools like the children to feel like they are making progress, so every 6 months the children got a new belt, until finally they were black belts.
It seems like the same thing has been happening with engineering titles.
Fwiw, black belt was basically when you actually started learning. Everything up until then was really just gaining what you needed in order to actually start learning. IIRC the “black” represented the dirt (effort) accumulated over time.
We are both wrong. I was thinking "Island south of Japan" and I said Taiwan, but I should have said Okinawa, which was conquered by Japan and part of the Japanese empire in the 1890s:
Especially in times when managers want to retain their best, they often can’t get HR to budge on salaries. So they promote them to get them into a competitive salary range.
It depends on the company. In my company (100,000 employees, but in IT less than 3,000) "senior" can be a college student, even "senior manager" can be a 22 year old college student, while "director" is the lowest level manager (with people reporting). They changed the titles recently saying "we have to align to the market", but it was to compensate the low salaries with high, meaningless titles.
For example a colleague was hired as an electrical engineer in a manufacturing plant in Germany. Because she did not speak German well enough (she is an immigrant), they gave her the position of plant IT manager with "senior manager" title. She is not even an IT person, just graduated college in EE, she does not know to write a line a code if her life depends on it. But hey, she is a senior! that is the point of the article.
Author here. I wrote this post after my comment on the post you're mentioning was rather well received. People asked me to write about that experience in more detail, so I did and shared it here. It's a related story, not an identical one.
I know a few people who have gone this route and now have very successful careers. Getting a job as a new grad is hard as it is, and if you are on a visa you barely have a month or two before you must obtain sponsorship or pack up and leave the country. "Consultancies" like this one give you a buffer, beef up your resume with fake experience and give you interview training, with the end goal of getting you a permanent tech job and getting a cut of your salary for the first N months.
Honestly, I don't even fault them for it. The author seemed a bit naive about the situation he was getting into, and he left, which is fair. Ultimately this whole thing is just a symptom of a broken immigration and hiring system. If an embellished resume can fool an entire big tech interview panel and the candidate actually does good work for them moving forward, who should take the blame for it?
While I'm not at all surprised that foreign students could easily get sucked into this kind of scheme what really surprises me is that an American CS grad would not have much better options, especially with all the hype about "lack of workers".
I intend to write a personal take on this topic as well. I am not a CS grad, but I definitely know CS grads who struggled to find work after college. One went to a bootcamp and still couldn't find a job. In my view, we tend to focus on the people that make it easily than those who struggle to get close.
I know at least a handful of people who graduated out of my CS program at a very reputed university but probably couldn't do fizzbuzz. And even otherwise, in recent years companies have massively cut down on new grad hiring because they don't want to spend time and money training them. Much easier to poach an experienced engineer from a competitor instead.
That strikes me as rather unlikely. Surely to pass at least some courses some not completely trivial amount of coding was required. Maybe the issue is the context in which the "Fibuzz" test is given is so different from that of class work or real work that the candidate just isn't used to operating under those conditions. I can especially see that if you're expected to recite every line of code perfectly over the phone or write them out on a whiteboard in front of a bunch of people.
One real moral of this story may be that the immigration system is so broken, and it has cascading consequences. Why not let people on student visas stay longer while job-searching?
As a fresh graduate I can really relate with this article. The number of recruiters that reached out to me since I started applying two months ago is insane, some of them just want a Microsoft Word version of my resume, some straight up asked me to add fake projects and internships on my resume.
That's without bringing the number of recruiters that wants you to pay them a weekly fee and "guarantee" you a job in X number of weeks.
I'll end with one funny recruiter that reached out two weeks ago from a similar recruiting firm. I made it clear from the beginning that I will NEVER lie on my resume neither allow them to edit my resume. He offers me this job that he found for me. I started asking about the compensation and he says 18$/hour, I laughed and said that this rate won't work for me especially in the Bay Area. He said he'll circle back with his manager and try to get me 65K/year like I asked which I believe is fair for someone fresh off school like me, I am not chasing after a FAANG salary especially being a recent grad. Anyways long story short, he calls me back and offers me $20/hour without any benefits this time. I just humbly declined and politely asked him to not reach me again.
The market seems to be hot for Senior developers, which leaves recent grads struggling to find jobs especially in a remote setting. I'm grateful that I am like OP where I can fall back on my parents and keep looking for a job neither do I need sponsorship.
This whole tale could have been me in Europe, 17 years ago.
I was desperately looking for a job, and these consulting firms are a dime a dozen. So there I went, fresh off uni, interview with a medium sized consulting firm from Mexico.
First day, one of the managers bragged about putting half dozen engineers in a motel, at walking distance from the customer offices, three per room, only things they did were work, eat and sleep, for six straight months.
Knowing no better and in dire need of money, I took the job.
Six months in, and after several weeks working 60 hours, I quit the day after I had a heat stroke because they moved us in a new office space with no windows or A/C.
I learnt afterwards that they were charging the customer 4x the rate they were paying me. Of course, they had "sold" me as a "senior developer".
Looks like H-1B abusers have touched a new nadir of chicanery and skullduggery. They prey on people who are not able to get interviews or jobs on their own, but have compelling reasons, such as crushing debt incurred to study in the U.S., to even consider debasing themselves in this way. There have been a couple of enforcement actions by the DoJ in Jersey and a few other places, but they have barely touched the tip of the iceberg.
Once a company sponsors an employee for a Green Card application, it has every incentive in the world to exploit and mistreat the employee. And many companies routinely act on the incentives.
It's unfortunate that a lot of the mass focus is on illegal immigrants, who have less of a legal standing and moral case than those who have followed the laws of their host country to the letter, but still find themselves treated like dirt. This is one of the unfortunate byproducts of electoral politics and representative democracy: sometimes, there are groups that are unlikely to matter electorally given their numbers, and their concerns are always given short shrift no matter how legitimate.
Of course, the H-1B system itself has done enormous damage to the industry by enabling companies such as IBM to mass fire entire cohorts of older people. As usual, efforts at reform have been fitful, uneven, and have been subject to the vagaries of the political winds.
Side note: there are (legitimate) training services that teach coding and interviewimg skills that have a setup where they try to get you a job (without fudging your CV). If you don't get a job you pay very little, but if you get a (good) job you pay similar to 10% or your salary for a few years. A pretty smart and entrepreneurial arrangement in my opinion.
(Unfortunate I don't remember the name or further details, I had read this in the newspaper in Mumbai perhaps 4 years ago.)
The place I used to work at hired fresh grads into senior positions exclusively to make the job more attractive. Sr. Engineering (position) had a much wider salary band, so it was apparently easier to hire fresh grads with a Masters degree into those positions, on the lower end of the band, and keep them there for 2-3 years before actually handing out any raises.
We also had very cheap company housing, and a lot of other perks.
And I suppose this is the opposite of Apple's strategy. There was a recent WashingtonPost article, apparently, any employee once they quit Apple (and become ex-employee) - HR changes their title to "Associate" - this affects future job verification & prospects, and someone filed a lawsuit on this.
Hiring consultants has really gone into the toilet. Senior Data Engineers who don't know what upsert is. Senior Developers who can't answer simple questions about a stack they have "3 years experience" in. Senior AWS Architects who stumble on simple architecture questions and insist on switching an 80K qps stack to API Gateway.
I presume because the real seniors these consulting firms depended on are working for FANNG/MAMMA?
Of course all of these firms want 2 weeks of "exploration" up front...
To be fair, if you can actually implement the strategies within using real technology (AWS, your own kafka cluster etc), then you deserve to be senior.
I read it like: Someone reads (skims?) that book, vaguely grasps the power of the concepts therein and then begins to treat everything like a nail that needs their hammer...failing to realize that many times and at many companies a simpler approach is good enough and the better choice for many definitions of better.
That insistence to see everything as a nail once you learn the hammer is the hubris of the not-actually-senior software engineer. Those who can determine when the complex approaches are warranted versus when they are not is the real senior.
A hiring manager friend at a Seattle unicorn once asked me to look over resumes. I didn't have a full grasp of how prevalent these "consultancies" are and was puzzled by all the jargon-filled, similar-looking resumes from people who were clearly working for "consultancies". Now I know, they were all looking for a ramp off! Some (many?) may even make great hires, but it' s hard to tease them out by looking at those resumes.
This reads like a human trafficking story, picking up cheap fresh grads and exploiting them to work way below market wages and making sure they can’t leave.
I recently started Web Development (well, it's been almost a year now). I am technically in a 'Junior' position, but I've read articles stating that it's only detrimental to list yourself as a Junior.
What are your thoughts? Am I still a Junior after a year? Should I keep the "Junior" label on my resume/linkedin if I'm still a Junior?
My standard advice is to use a job title that fits your ability. If you don't, it's going to be a bad fit.
That said, if you're looking for a new job and are still a junior, you're probably switching far too quickly.
My plan was to switch at 3 years experience, at which point I'd drop the junior title for sure. I ended up staying longer (because they increased my pay very well the first 3 years, and then started screwing me over) and my second job was "lead developer", which I still have 11 years later. I'm sure I could get more money if I switched, but I like my job and my company and my coworkers, so it's been hard to find anything I want more, no matter the money.
In short, no, if you switch jobs, you shouldn't call yourself a junior, one way or another.
> That said, if you're looking for a new job and are still a junior, you're probably switching far too quickly.
couldn't disagree more. people should change jobs every week if they're able to. why stay at company A making X, if company B is willing to hire you now, for 1.5-3x? if you stay at a company for an arbitrarily long period of time, you're just throwing away tons of money
From a pure immediate money perspective, sure changing immediately to a higher paying job makes sense.
However, generally each new job comes with a ramp up time before you become useful and then a further ramp up before you can develop new skills (in my limited experience).
I don’t think I could properly progress in my career by building higher level skills if I had to learn new organisational practices and technical skills every few months. And arguably, IMO proper progress is essential to securing significantly higher salaries in the future (but I’m not sure how the total money aspect works out though).
That's a fair point but to me that's already built in to job hopping. If you're not able to secure a new job (or hold down an existing job), then you keep progressing, but at a higher salary. I work for money and nothing else (I couldn't care less about software) so I gain no benefit from doing the same thing (growing my skills) at a current job than at a new job with a much higher salary.
It obviously isn't a universal preference, but I get most of my job satisfaction from having deep familiarity with the ecosystem I work with. I don't get that level of familiarity before a year or two, and it only gets stronger from there. I'm about to hit 4 years at my current job and my job satisfaction has never been higher. I might be able to make more money by hopping to a FAANG, but I would surely take a hit to my happiness.
I would say drop it. Personally, I see "junior" positions as a way for companies to advertise they're willing to hire people with little to no professional experience (e.g. new grads). Once hired, a "junior" probably has the same responsibilities as a "normal"/non-senior developer, just less is expected of you, so there's little reason to differentiate. You just have a bit more to learn.
A previous employer of mine gave all devs the title of "Technical Specialist" as opposed to some variation of "Software Developer." They also had a progression system where "Junior" was not actually the lowest rung, but the second-lowest after "Graduate".
Needless to say I just put "Software Developer" on my CV without a second thought.
The only time I would recommend putting the "Junior" title on your CV/Linkedin is if you get a promotion which could be perceived as faster-than-average upward progression.
A first job is always a "Junior" one, whether the title says it or not.
In my current company, you're in a junior position until five years of experience or two years of tenure. So, of course you're still a "junior" after a single year.
Big titles and fast promotions are potential red flags, avoid inflating your current position. It's like saying "I'm super strong with a perfect GPA" in a interview, well lol, you're going to get wrecked.
Junior is fine for a year or two. Lots of people start that way so if your career really is just starting it’s ok to be junior, intern, or associate to get in the door. Then try to get a title change / promotion when you can by asking what their expectations are. Usually it’s pretty fast at that level so it should easy for them to speak to.
I've mentioned this before, but I think the conflation of 'developer' and 'software engineer' can really cause confusion when hiring. These are different roles that most HR, management and even most 'developers' aren't clear on. When you aren't clear on what a 'software engineer' actually does, and don't hire based on what that role really means but based on some other semi-related criteria like 'works well with clients' or 'bills lots of hours', you're going to wind up with a lot of confusion.
As soon as I saw the word "consulting" it was all I needed to know. These companies want to bill someone out to the client as a senior engineer while paying them new grad wages. That's all there is to it. If you've ever worked with consultants this won't be a surprise.
I feel like these titles are a big reason we don't disclose our salaries in the US (beyond other cultural issues) - the title is our flex.
It's always seemed to me that they are a bit meaningless though. I'm a super senior engineer at my current company because I've been here for a lifetime. I have a lot of skills that port from company to company, but to my current company, I'm even more valuable because I know how to keep this train moving and how to get the tracks switched if need be. I have no doubt I'd need time to become that useful as an engineer at another company. My point is, titles are to some extent, onjly pertinent to your current setting.
End justifies the means, to me this doesn’t cross the line, except for the potentially visa fraud part and the feeder org could just be upfront about what they’re doing.
For the us citizens into something like that it doesn’t matter to me.
Once you get in the organization and good salary figure it out, it’s the big tech that has an inefficiency screening process that isn’t good for anyone. They should be having their own bootcamps imo, train your potential employees.
Given what software engineer actually do at all levels, there is no reason to waste your life and time on a ladder unless you personally want to feel more comfortable in the role
A developer doesn't become a senior developer until they realize they know nothing and can truly start to learn.
As a junior you want to master the syntax and framework.
As an senior immediate developer you have mastered the framework/language and you can do anything. You are sure you have found the way and will share and fight for this way over all others.
As a senior developer you see more and realize you actually know very little. The stack you mastered is one of many and the one way can be replaced by a number of different ways.
As a true master developer you realize the framework/language has been programming you.
I got senior last summer after 7 and a half years... each to their own I guess! But even now I question the title so no idea how people can do it with 0 years experience and a little bit of JS/React knowledge
Oh God, I got two paragraphs in and thought, "This sounds like Unbounded Solutions/BrighterBrain/Enhance IT." They called me a few times, then I looked them up and discovered their business model, and everything in me said "avoid, avoid, avoid". Knowing there's another firm doing this, and hearing the sordid details, has me feeling blackpilled at the state of the industry.
This article sounds like uninformed speculation. Every semi-serious will do (or outsource) candidate background checks to verify identity and employment history. It may be possible to fake histories to customers at body shops/WITCH because the employer is in on it, everywhere else, the lies will be short lived.
Where I was at senior was the base title. Then there were numbers after the title and team lead after.
At the time I would not have marketed myself as a senior but that's what they paid me as/my title and I kept the job for almost two and a half years so I guess I'm senior?
I avoid using the word engineer though as I don't have a degree.
A thing that will never cease to irk me is the flattening of titles in tech.
Seeing people with similar titles to my own who I wouldn't trust with my toaster much less my MLOps pipelines is infuriating, because it just dilutes the signals to recruiters, employers, prospective clients.
I was the sole tech guy (backend/frontend/help desk).. and my boss during the annual review asked me to pick a job title any title. I was already senior engineer, so went for Technology Director. CTO would have worked against me on my next job move.
> I accepted a job offer ... They promised they would
When an employer you don't know promises something other than in writing, ask them to put it in writing. If they don't, you might still take the offer, but it would be an offer _without_ said promise.
This game of getting OPT,CPT, H4-EAD candidates and putting them though some boot camp and free housing is at least 24 years—remember Y2K and dot com. Indian and Chinese international students in the USA know about it.
I had a really similar experience as my first software dev job and this post brought up a lot of old memories. I ended up writing quite a lot, but I hope it's helpful for someone else in a situation like this. It wasn't until I started reading HN that I began realizing how common these types of experiences may be.
The company I worked for was a small consultancy specialized in customizing/integrating an enterprise software package sold by one of the big old names in enterprise IT. There were several F500 companies in their clients list.
The interview was extremely cursory and positive, like the one described in this article. I was offered a position almost immediately which was quite surprising given my lack of experience with their domain. The company also had a very "family-like" atmosphere, everybody I dealt with, including the owner, was actually very friendly and supportive throughout. Single digit headcount. There were a couple H1-B visa holders on staff, but it was not the majority. They cultivated the same kind of "we are all in this together" kind of attitude. It wasn't until I went on site for my first assignment that I realized how they operated.
I went through about two weeks of training then was flown out to the HQ of one of our biggest clients. Huge, household name F500 company, I had no experience with that kind of organization before. I vividly remember the first day on site. I am just off the flight and eating in the client's cafeteria with the owner of the consultancy and two coworkers. The owner tells me that he has told everyone on the client's team that I am a senior consultant with 5 years experience. At that time, I was just a couple years out of college with no relevant work experience, only some hobby level programming skills. I was totally blindsided and was immediately put into meetings with the client's team where I had to think fast in order to present myself properly. I was presented as a resource for the client's team to learn from, meaning I had to field questions, equivocate, then follow up later after I had asked my co-workers at the consultancy for help. I'm sure I was no use at all during those first couple weeks and I shudder to think of how I presented to the client's team. I know there was at least one other co-worker who was put in a similar position at the same time.
At the time, for me personally there was no question about whether I should go along with this or not. I had hotel and flights paid for and no other immediate career prospects. To be totally honest, I didn't immediately feel an ethical conflict, mostly a naive sense of responsibility to not let my coworkers down and a curiosity about whether I could actually do the technical work that the client expected. I was also very curious about the large, corporate environment which I had never worked in before.
I gradually learned that our consultancy's headcount was overstated by a factor of 10 to 100, depending on the client. Members of our extremely small team were rotated in and out to clients in order to give the appearance of a much larger team. I believe my boss' strategy was to use the inevitable staffing difficulties this caused as leverage in negotiations with our clients, in order to demonstrate that we were highly in-demand experts. I also learned that the software we specialized in was completely oversold relative to the customer's needs, and shipped with huge swathes of functionality missing or broken. These missing or broken features were responsible for generating a ton of revenue for not only our consultancy, but at least two other, much larger firms. One would almost think it was a deliberate design decision.
The post mentions imposter syndrome, I would be curious to hear more about how this experience affected that for the author. Oddly enough, my own experience with a shady consultancy had a huge personal benefit in overcoming my own feelings of imposter syndrome. I am a good communicator and realized that I could quickly learn the jargon and social conventions of this workplace. After a couple weeks on the job I was actually productive and built out some major chunks of custom functionality. I learned quickly and the work was not really that technically challenging. If anything, it showed me that you could survive in large organizations like our client company by being an effective communicator and that most of the people employed there weren't intimidating wizards. I actually really enjoyed working with many of our client's staff and wish I could have done so under better circumstances.
I left after a little over a year. The amount of pay wasn't too bad but there were several unannounced late paychecks that spooked me. Also, even though my skills were up to the task and I worked well with my teams, the feeling of constantly looking over one's shoulder and having to keep up the management's lies really took a mental toll. At first it was exhilarating, but eventually I came to the same conclusion that the OP did where I felt I could not build a career on this foundation. I completely changed industries to shake up the depression that settled on me. Shortly afterwards, I learned my boss was engaging in some sort of tax scheme that caught up with him, resulting in him dissolving the company then fleeing the US for a time.
Ultimately working for this company taught me a lot of soft skills and not a lot of transferable technical skills. My opinion is that the burnout I felt, leading me to change careers, probably had a detrimental effect on my long-term career prospects. I later realized I actually enjoyed and excelled at software dev and could have been much further along that path by now if my first experience wasn't so bad. Overall I have very mixed feelings about the experience but it was formative for younger me learning how the world works.
Wow, thank you so much for writing out and sharing your story.
>I would be curious to hear more about how this experience affected that for the author.
I think you and I have a lot of similarities on this regard. I also learned later in my career that I don't have to be a technical wizard to provide a lot of value to teams and projects. My biggest strengths are being an effective communicator and being able to come up with sustainable solutions that solve the problem at hand while also being maintainable in the long run. When it comes to things like coding itself, I'm mediocre.
There are also companies that post fake jobs and then use the good resumes with minor tweaks to help market their own employees. It's so dodgy, wish there was a way to improve transparency.
Sometimes it means, "Able to work without someone looking over their shoulder at all times."
Sometimes it means, "Able to lead and mentor others."
And sometimes it means, "Has organizational skills above and beyond engineering skills, able to lead cross-team initiatives and deal with all the human/organization issues around the engineering."
The latter definition is the most interesting to me, it describes what "Staff" and "Principal" engineers do in most orgs. But if I had to pick a line to draw, I'd say that while a Staff or Principal spends most or all of their time working on projects that involve the human/organization issues around the engineering, a senior engineer is one who does this at least part of the time.
There are other, perfectly valid perspectives on what makes an engineer "senior," but what I like about this one that's relevant to TFA is that this kind of "seniority" is hard to fake.