6 ms·

I caught the car

55 points by holden_nelson 4mo ago

thisisauserid 4mo ago
"what does the dog actually do if it catches it?" Author achieved the senior role, but is unsure what comes next.
ludston 4mo ago
First of all, congratulations. As somebody that also achieved the senior developer title within the first three years of being hired out of University, mostly by luck: Yay money, but I wasn't a senior engineer really for another five years. For me, I needed to see the long term effects of the changes that I'd made and the software I had written to really understand the difference between cargo cult behaviour and what really mattered for the business I was working for.
Neywiny 4mo ago
Do we have thoughts on how important "senior"/"staff" is vs bullet points on resumes and the years of service?
- Hamuko 4mo ago
  I have no idea what goes on in the minds of HR people.
  - Neywiny 4mo ago
    An interesting point. Presumably you'd come at it from a different though equally valid angle
- Swizec 4mo ago
  > Do we have thoughts on how important "senior"/"staff" is vs bullet points on resumes and the years of service? As a hiring manager, I only read the bullet points. I’ve interviewed startup CTOs who were mid-level engineers at best and “Software Engineer” vanilla titled engineers who have shipped and owned impressive things over years. The scale, complexity, and variety of the systems you’ve built, shipped, owned, and maintained trumps all else. And yes we can see through the bullshit. Everyone has built a “semantic document retrieval system” in the last 3 years. That’s a weekend project, gonna need a little more to be impressive :)
  - Neywiny 4mo ago
    Interesting. Not looking to switch roles at present but what do you make of these two projects? One done basically over a weekend, one done over many weekends Removed a bunch of bad code and got a 1/3rd speed up https://github.com/mhostetter/gr-adsb/pull/69 https://github.com/mhostetter/gr-adsb/pull/69 Added a new chip to qemu along with some significant peripherals. Never finished it but I did boot Linux on it I think with the upstream device tree. https://github.com/Neywiny/qemu/tree/h745 https://github.com/Neywiny/qemu/tree/h745
- wat10000 4mo ago
  I ignore job titles on resumes. I want to know what they did, I don't care what their company called them.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- Esophagus4 4mo ago
  Role is a combination of title + company. Head of Eng at 50 person startup (with 25 engineers) might be Manager 2 at FAANG. So I mostly ignore the title and look at the work history and YOE.
- holden_nelson 4mo ago
  Important to who? As an engineer, I just want to get an idea of where this person is at in their learning journey and what their personality is like, do they have certain intangibles, etc. The recruiter who screens the person before they ever talk to me, on the other hand...
BowBun 4mo ago
When I meet fellow devs, I ask what projects they've shipped. Roles are near-meaningless across companies and convey 0 information about what their work involves in my experience. I appreciate that OP learned something about the job through this article.
- boron1006 4mo ago
  This isn’t foolproof either and plenty of people can talk convincingly about running projects that they had little to nothing to do with.
  - BowBun 4mo ago
    Totally agreed, I've been 'got' in interviews before. Now I ask follow-ups with specifics. If you were an IC, you should know libraries/architectures that were used. If you were in leadership, you should be able to tell me the story leading up to a project, about the parties involved, and the outcomes. It takes time to do properly, though. And most of the time I just don't care about evaluating someone's capabilities like that.
- holden_nelson 4mo ago
  I agree, it feels like roles help the most by getting you through the recruiter and in front of a hiring manager. Which is unfortunate.
retired 4mo ago
I was senior in about three years. It helps to work for a consultancy company, they can charge a higher rate by calling me a senior. Personally I don't think you can be a senior before ten years of fulltime work.
- hyperhello 4mo ago
  Maybe not neccesarily exactly ten years, but you couldn't be both a junior and a senior so far as the roles have meaning. A senior is supposed to know how to function within the company and obstinately perform certain roles in their certain way, but a junior is supposed to come into the company fresh and try to simplify the work with their eyes that are not trained to do it the senior's way. Neither person is wrong but the roles need to be in opposition. That's why it's so annoying to read about companies who think they can replace junior workers with AI. While imagining they're living in the future, they're not thinking about the future at all.
- ghaff 4mo ago
  That’s sort of how it works in banks where basically everyone is a VP.
AIorNot 4mo ago
So many kids on hacker news - I’d say SWE is an experienced engineer not a senior developer- for Pete’s sake he graduated in 2023 that was 3 freaking years ago I’ve been developing production software for 20 years now - What other profession counts someone with 3 years of professional experience out of college as senior? Maybe competitive sports? Or academic math? If it means this kid is smart and good at coding sure ill buy that but experiences and wisdom are something else entirely..
- tekla 4mo ago
  Haha, I know people who have worked on designing a single part smaller than a closed fist for over 5 years and were still considered just over junior because they didn't have enough experience with the system it was used in.
- beau_g 4mo ago
  I disagree and think the software model described works better when done well. I have seen this within a company, where both the hardware side and software side used the same titles (senior, staff, senior staff, principal). The hardware side used largely a combination of industry tenure and especially whether they had PHDs/patents/inventions or not to determine these titles, while the software org was very gung ho on using responsibility and influence to determine promotions. The other thing this led to is in the hardware org, often people would get hired on as senior staff or principal, while this almost never happened on the software side (nobody could get hired on as these roles as they couldn't possibly meet the rubric, as it required some outsized impact in the company with thousands of people using software you near singlehandedly developed and maintained). As other people pointed out in this post in a roundabout way, titles only matter at all internally to a given company. And considering that, compare these two systems; yes the software org in this system does end up in a position where a 25 year old that's been at the company for 3 years could be senior staff, but that's very telling, to do that, they absolutely had to ship something novel, useful to many, and keep it running and good. Knowing that someone is a very well educated graybeard that invented something at Sun in 1989 is also some good information, but from the context of communicating with people in other orgs within a company I don't know so well, it's more valuable to me personally to understand whether they are responsible for a large running process and to what degree, moreso than how long they have been around and what they did elsewhere.
JSR_FDED 4mo ago
Humblebrag masquerading as self-reflection.
- Paracompact 4mo ago
  Eh, kinda. But there was enough self-deprecation there that it doesn't leave a bad taste in my mouth, and I consider this a genuine reflection. > Why did I need validation from my org chart? > Pretty quickly realized I was being kind of a bitch. > I have a bad case of Why Not Me syndrome. These cut deeper than faux modesty and are clearly insecurities. It's the rebelling of a sensible superego against an id hungry for validation, and the author doesn't downplay either of the two. But yes, I'm sure he also gets a perverse thrill out of advertising his achievement, even if he intends to disparage it. It's a complicated psyche I'm rather familiar with.
  - holden_nelson 4mo ago
    Thanks for the charitable read. Yeah, it's not like the part of my personality I'm lamenting has just gone away ;) I did have a hard time writing this post because I'm not under the delusion that what I achieved is truly grand or worth posting on HN about. It was more meant to be a reflection on a mistake I made: setting a bad goal and then fixating on it. But yes, I feel a small tinge in my brain whenever I'm introduced as a "senior engineer". I'll know I've truly made it when that finally goes away.
- gerdesj 4mo ago
  I think that's rather unkind. From my perspective: it looks like a coming of age ... blinking into adulthood sort of voyage of discovery.
  - Esophagus4 4mo ago
    Nicely said.
- holden_nelson 4mo ago
  Oh man. That means I'm _so_ obsessed with my new title that I've gone meta and found a sneaky, disingenuous way to brag about it on HN. Thanks for pointing that out. I must have a serious personality disorder. I should probably see a shrink
wewewedxfgdf 4mo ago
Who cares about titles? It's a really bad signal when a software developer cares about their title. All that matters is are you good at the work.
- iwontberude 4mo ago
  When you work for a company like Google, that title change determines whether or not you are taken seriously. People that get stuck at the same level are often pushed out of teams with performance improvement plans. They expect you to strive for promotion and the culture in these places is reinforcing this progression. It's mostly theater but the outcomes for people's pay is very real, thus the focus on title.
  - wewewedxfgdf 4mo ago
    Sounds awful, spending headspace and energy on trying to climb some stupid corporate ladder.
  - SauntSolaire 4mo ago
    > People that get stuck at the same level are often pushed out of teams with performance improvement plans. Only if you get stuck at the entry level. L5, is considered terminal and no one will push you out for not going for L6. (Google also recently 'declared' L4 a terminal position — likely so they could be stingier with L5 promotions — but what your manager considers terminal is what matters most)
- tom_ 4mo ago
  The title often relates to the money, which is the bit you probably want.
- keybored 4mo ago
  Junior programmers are the idiot foil of all anecdotes on HN in the last three years. Only juniors do that; everything went fine until the junior...; anyway, the junior sent me a eight thousand diff of obvious slop; so now I got my first gray hairs, thanks Jane Junior; juniors writing naive, clearly quadratic code.[1] Naturally these are the least skilled of your colleagues so that part is a given. But almost all anecdotes are about them as foils. Very few about them as the next generation being mentored. It’s so slanted that people have to actively temper the euphoria shared by tech billionaires and 100X engineers with 25+ years of non-slop code experience: well until the seniors get an immortality pill you still need to raise new 100X engineers. Of course the response to this will be, “I never cared about titles! The “juniors I talk about have work experience ranging from zero to thirty years!”... [1] Sources: all made up.
keybored 4mo ago
> When I had learned that, my first instinct was to be happy for him, proud, impressed, etc (genuinely). My second was to want the same for myself. Badly. > [...] Think back (addressing you, the reader, now) to the time when you were happiest in your career or academic life. Was it when some sinecurist asshole in a gown handed you your diploma? Uh, what? This is what this person wanted. Now after the fact they’re an anti-credentialist rebel. Well, thinking of people who make a lot of money and then insist that money doesn’t matter. It makes sense. > Going forward, the only person I need to impress is myself. Thinking of the few things that I take quiet pride in because I only want to impress myself... I keep myself in check by not talking about it. lol.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
maccard 4mo ago
> I started my first software job out of college in July of 2023. In January 2026, two and a half years later, I secured my second promotion, earning the title of Senior Software Engineer. > certainly there are hard lessons that I have yet to learn in my career - but my company does not hand that title out like candy > had (and still have) an excellent mentor <..> he had just been promoted to Senior SE. He was two years out of school himself. I'm sure OP is a great engineer, and earned their promotion (genuinely, I am). But it sounds like his company hands out titles like candy. As others have said titles are meaningless but I've worked with enough recruiters to know that they do have some sway on non-technical people..
- Esophagus4 4mo ago
  I interviewed with a company that said that. They promoted an engineer 18 months out of undergrad to senior. They said it to indicate growth potential at the company, but I saw it as a big red flag.
- m463 4mo ago
  I remember discovering a long time ago there were lots of VPs at yahoo.
  - sokoloff 4mo ago
    Same in financial services. I became a VP at 28 or 29 and we had Assistant VPs in their early 20s in tech.
- holden_nelson 4mo ago
  Ha! It's funny I didn't notice that juxtaposition when I was writing it. Understandable take. One counterpoint I would offer (with no proof, so take it or leave it) is that what I mostly see is engineers get passed up for promos that I feel they deserve. I think a large part of that is cutbacks - they haven't done layoffs, but around the time I started, they started cutting benefits, cutting RSUs, and my manager literally told me "due to budget constraints they are going to scrutinize promos very heavily going forward." But! I don't work at a FAANG or an AI firm or anywhere with an extreme performance culture either. So regardless of YOE, if you're skilled, motivated, and a little lucky, you can really shine...
tyleo 4mo ago
I hit principal pretty early on in my career. I keep a detailed work history for anyone interested in what that journey is like: https://www.tyleo.com/professional-work-history https://www.tyleo.com/professional-work-history It's both hustle and luck. One reason I left Microsoft was because I wasn't on track there. The organization was good but also top heavy so there wasn't room for growth. When I joined Rec Room the tech I built really clicked and the company scaled rapidly. Our team became critical and helped hundreds of coworkers advance their goals. I've heard another principal engineer describe this as, "being pulled into the white hot burning center of a company". As far as I can tell there's no "trick" to hitting the role. I'd describe it more as, "repeatedly move mountains". There's some luck identifying the right mountains and luck + hustle moving them at all.
- Loughla 4mo ago
  I like the insight of luck combined with incredible talent. Too many people get a bad taste in their mouth by leaders who only attribute success to hard work and dedication. Knowing what battles to really fight and die for is a talent in and of itself, but it's also a bit of luck to both have access to systems to allow you to impact important projects and also to end up impacting the right ones. It's very frustrating to be able to have a massive impact, but not get any sort of notice for it. Many people just start punching a clock when that happens. I've done it.
- holden_nelson 4mo ago
  Thanks for sharing. Really impressive journey, congrats and nicely done. I touched on it a little bit in my post but yeah I can not overstate the role of luck, both "internal luck" (do I have a good manager) and "external luck" (did I choose the right offer out of college). I mean sure, pat myself on the back for doing well in my intern interview, doing well in the internship and getting the return offer, doing well when I returned after school, etc... but I was damn lucky that recruiter plucked my resume out of the stack and put it on the "send a coding screen" pile when I was still in school. So yeah, the way I view it is that you have to be ready to take advantage when the luck breaks your way.
theteapot 4mo ago
Congratulations. It made me remember how proud I was when I became a Senior, and then earned my Super Engineer shortly after. Just recently I've earned my Extreme Engineer title. Good luck on your journey.
- holden_nelson 4mo ago
  Thanks! Good luck as you work your way towards Scrum Master ;)
mnmnmn 4mo ago
[dead]
ookblah 4mo ago
i was "cto" at 26 (lol). point being outside of securing a better pay package and using it for job networking purposes your "title" is largely irrelevant as a measure against yourself. don't rely too much on some company handing you a title to determine how skilled you are.
holden_nelson 4mo ago
Author here. I just started blogging this year. Been really interesting to see a post get some traction and read everyone's responses. Thank you all for reading. I left out a detail that might be relevant? Maybe not? I couldn't decide. SWE is actually a second career for me. I flunked out of college when I was 19, spent most of my 20s working as a chef, and then graduated college and started this job at 29. So I'm 31 now. So it's been funny to read things like "Congrats to this kid" haha. If the post was about _how_ I got promoted that fast, I'm pretty sure this ^ would be the #1 reason. I'd already been programming for like 10 years when I started this job. People paid me (almost nothing) to write software that they still use today (much to my chagrin - it wasn't very good). So I felt like I had a "head start" compared to most of my intern cohort (though, to be clear, I still to this day feel very behind, in general).
- menno-sh 4mo ago
  > I'd already been programming for like 10 years when I started this job The first 6-12 months after university are largely about 'learning how to work'. I'd say getting that out of the way is a pretty nice head start.
reflection42 4mo ago
Wonderful to see a worked example of self-reflection to help uncover what is personally important in work. As many will know, this kind of reflection is close to one of the pivotal exercises recommended in Richard Bolles valuable book on choosing a career or next career step “What Color is your Parachute“.

55 points by holden_nelson 4mo ago

"what does the dog actually do if it catches it?" Author achieved the senior role, but is unsure what comes next.

First of all, congratulations. As somebody that also achieved the senior developer title within the first three years of being hired out of University, mostly by luck: Yay money, but I wasn't a senior engineer really for another five years. For me, I needed to see the long term effects of the changes that I'd made and the software I had written to really understand the difference between cargo cult behaviour and what really mattered for the business I was working for.

Neywiny 4mo ago

Do we have thoughts on how important "senior"/"staff" is vs bullet points on resumes and the years of service?

Hamuko 4mo ago
I have no idea what goes on in the minds of HR people.
- Neywiny 4mo ago
  An interesting point. Presumably you'd come at it from a different though equally valid angle
Swizec 4mo ago
> Do we have thoughts on how important "senior"/"staff" is vs bullet points on resumes and the years of service? As a hiring manager, I only read the bullet points. I’ve interviewed startup CTOs who were mid-level engineers at best and “Software Engineer” vanilla titled engineers who have shipped and owned impressive things over years. The scale, complexity, and variety of the systems you’ve built, shipped, owned, and maintained trumps all else. And yes we can see through the bullshit. Everyone has built a “semantic document retrieval system” in the last 3 years. That’s a weekend project, gonna need a little more to be impressive :)
- Neywiny 4mo ago
  Interesting. Not looking to switch roles at present but what do you make of these two projects? One done basically over a weekend, one done over many weekends Removed a bunch of bad code and got a 1/3rd speed up https://github.com/mhostetter/gr-adsb/pull/69 https://github.com/mhostetter/gr-adsb/pull/69 Added a new chip to qemu along with some significant peripherals. Never finished it but I did boot Linux on it I think with the upstream device tree. https://github.com/Neywiny/qemu/tree/h745 https://github.com/Neywiny/qemu/tree/h745
wat10000 4mo ago
I ignore job titles on resumes. I want to know what they did, I don't care what their company called them.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
Esophagus4 4mo ago
Role is a combination of title + company. Head of Eng at 50 person startup (with 25 engineers) might be Manager 2 at FAANG. So I mostly ignore the title and look at the work history and YOE.
holden_nelson 4mo ago
Important to who? As an engineer, I just want to get an idea of where this person is at in their learning journey and what their personality is like, do they have certain intangibles, etc. The recruiter who screens the person before they ever talk to me, on the other hand...

BowBun 4mo ago

When I meet fellow devs, I ask what projects they've shipped. Roles are near-meaningless across companies and convey 0 information about what their work involves in my experience. I appreciate that OP learned something about the job through this article.

boron1006 4mo ago
This isn’t foolproof either and plenty of people can talk convincingly about running projects that they had little to nothing to do with.
- BowBun 4mo ago
  Totally agreed, I've been 'got' in interviews before. Now I ask follow-ups with specifics. If you were an IC, you should know libraries/architectures that were used. If you were in leadership, you should be able to tell me the story leading up to a project, about the parties involved, and the outcomes. It takes time to do properly, though. And most of the time I just don't care about evaluating someone's capabilities like that.
holden_nelson 4mo ago
I agree, it feels like roles help the most by getting you through the recruiter and in front of a hiring manager. Which is unfortunate.

retired 4mo ago

I was senior in about three years. It helps to work for a consultancy company, they can charge a higher rate by calling me a senior. Personally I don't think you can be a senior before ten years of fulltime work.

hyperhello 4mo ago
Maybe not neccesarily exactly ten years, but you couldn't be both a junior and a senior so far as the roles have meaning. A senior is supposed to know how to function within the company and obstinately perform certain roles in their certain way, but a junior is supposed to come into the company fresh and try to simplify the work with their eyes that are not trained to do it the senior's way. Neither person is wrong but the roles need to be in opposition. That's why it's so annoying to read about companies who think they can replace junior workers with AI. While imagining they're living in the future, they're not thinking about the future at all.
ghaff 4mo ago
That’s sort of how it works in banks where basically everyone is a VP.

AIorNot 4mo ago

So many kids on hacker news - I’d say SWE is an experienced engineer not a senior developer- for Pete’s sake he graduated in 2023 that was 3 freaking years ago I’ve been developing production software for 20 years now - What other profession counts someone with 3 years of professional experience out of college as senior? Maybe competitive sports? Or academic math? If it means this kid is smart and good at coding sure ill buy that but experiences and wisdom are something else entirely..

tekla 4mo ago
Haha, I know people who have worked on designing a single part smaller than a closed fist for over 5 years and were still considered just over junior because they didn't have enough experience with the system it was used in.
beau_g 4mo ago
I disagree and think the software model described works better when done well. I have seen this within a company, where both the hardware side and software side used the same titles (senior, staff, senior staff, principal). The hardware side used largely a combination of industry tenure and especially whether they had PHDs/patents/inventions or not to determine these titles, while the software org was very gung ho on using responsibility and influence to determine promotions. The other thing this led to is in the hardware org, often people would get hired on as senior staff or principal, while this almost never happened on the software side (nobody could get hired on as these roles as they couldn't possibly meet the rubric, as it required some outsized impact in the company with thousands of people using software you near singlehandedly developed and maintained). As other people pointed out in this post in a roundabout way, titles only matter at all internally to a given company. And considering that, compare these two systems; yes the software org in this system does end up in a position where a 25 year old that's been at the company for 3 years could be senior staff, but that's very telling, to do that, they absolutely had to ship something novel, useful to many, and keep it running and good. Knowing that someone is a very well educated graybeard that invented something at Sun in 1989 is also some good information, but from the context of communicating with people in other orgs within a company I don't know so well, it's more valuable to me personally to understand whether they are responsible for a large running process and to what degree, moreso than how long they have been around and what they did elsewhere.

JSR_FDED 4mo ago

Humblebrag masquerading as self-reflection.

Paracompact 4mo ago
Eh, kinda. But there was enough self-deprecation there that it doesn't leave a bad taste in my mouth, and I consider this a genuine reflection. > Why did I need validation from my org chart? > Pretty quickly realized I was being kind of a bitch. > I have a bad case of Why Not Me syndrome. These cut deeper than faux modesty and are clearly insecurities. It's the rebelling of a sensible superego against an id hungry for validation, and the author doesn't downplay either of the two. But yes, I'm sure he also gets a perverse thrill out of advertising his achievement, even if he intends to disparage it. It's a complicated psyche I'm rather familiar with.
- holden_nelson 4mo ago
  Thanks for the charitable read. Yeah, it's not like the part of my personality I'm lamenting has just gone away ;) I did have a hard time writing this post because I'm not under the delusion that what I achieved is truly grand or worth posting on HN about. It was more meant to be a reflection on a mistake I made: setting a bad goal and then fixating on it. But yes, I feel a small tinge in my brain whenever I'm introduced as a "senior engineer". I'll know I've truly made it when that finally goes away.
gerdesj 4mo ago
I think that's rather unkind. From my perspective: it looks like a coming of age ... blinking into adulthood sort of voyage of discovery.
- Esophagus4 4mo ago
  Nicely said.
holden_nelson 4mo ago
Oh man. That means I'm _so_ obsessed with my new title that I've gone meta and found a sneaky, disingenuous way to brag about it on HN. Thanks for pointing that out. I must have a serious personality disorder. I should probably see a shrink

wewewedxfgdf 4mo ago

Who cares about titles? It's a really bad signal when a software developer cares about their title. All that matters is are you good at the work.

iwontberude 4mo ago
When you work for a company like Google, that title change determines whether or not you are taken seriously. People that get stuck at the same level are often pushed out of teams with performance improvement plans. They expect you to strive for promotion and the culture in these places is reinforcing this progression. It's mostly theater but the outcomes for people's pay is very real, thus the focus on title.
- wewewedxfgdf 4mo ago
  Sounds awful, spending headspace and energy on trying to climb some stupid corporate ladder.
- SauntSolaire 4mo ago
  > People that get stuck at the same level are often pushed out of teams with performance improvement plans. Only if you get stuck at the entry level. L5, is considered terminal and no one will push you out for not going for L6. (Google also recently 'declared' L4 a terminal position — likely so they could be stingier with L5 promotions — but what your manager considers terminal is what matters most)
tom_ 4mo ago
The title often relates to the money, which is the bit you probably want.
keybored 4mo ago
Junior programmers are the idiot foil of all anecdotes on HN in the last three years. Only juniors do that; everything went fine until the junior...; anyway, the junior sent me a eight thousand diff of obvious slop; so now I got my first gray hairs, thanks Jane Junior; juniors writing naive, clearly quadratic code.[1] Naturally these are the least skilled of your colleagues so that part is a given. But almost all anecdotes are about them as foils. Very few about them as the next generation being mentored. It’s so slanted that people have to actively temper the euphoria shared by tech billionaires and 100X engineers with 25+ years of non-slop code experience: well until the seniors get an immortality pill you still need to raise new 100X engineers. Of course the response to this will be, “I never cared about titles! The “juniors I talk about have work experience ranging from zero to thirty years!”... [1] Sources: all made up.

keybored 4mo ago

> When I had learned that, my first instinct was to be happy for him, proud, impressed, etc (genuinely). My second was to want the same for myself. Badly. > [...] Think back (addressing you, the reader, now) to the time when you were happiest in your career or academic life. Was it when some sinecurist asshole in a gown handed you your diploma? Uh, what? This is what this person wanted. Now after the fact they’re an anti-credentialist rebel. Well, thinking of people who make a lot of money and then insist that money doesn’t matter. It makes sense. > Going forward, the only person I need to impress is myself. Thinking of the few things that I take quiet pride in because I only want to impress myself... I keep myself in check by not talking about it. lol.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

maccard 4mo ago

> I started my first software job out of college in July of 2023. In January 2026, two and a half years later, I secured my second promotion, earning the title of Senior Software Engineer. > certainly there are hard lessons that I have yet to learn in my career - but my company does not hand that title out like candy > had (and still have) an excellent mentor <..> he had just been promoted to Senior SE. He was two years out of school himself. I'm sure OP is a great engineer, and earned their promotion (genuinely, I am). But it sounds like his company hands out titles like candy. As others have said titles are meaningless but I've worked with enough recruiters to know that they do have some sway on non-technical people..

Esophagus4 4mo ago
I interviewed with a company that said that. They promoted an engineer 18 months out of undergrad to senior. They said it to indicate growth potential at the company, but I saw it as a big red flag.
m463 4mo ago
I remember discovering a long time ago there were lots of VPs at yahoo.
- sokoloff 4mo ago
  Same in financial services. I became a VP at 28 or 29 and we had Assistant VPs in their early 20s in tech.
holden_nelson 4mo ago
Ha! It's funny I didn't notice that juxtaposition when I was writing it. Understandable take. One counterpoint I would offer (with no proof, so take it or leave it) is that what I mostly see is engineers get passed up for promos that I feel they deserve. I think a large part of that is cutbacks - they haven't done layoffs, but around the time I started, they started cutting benefits, cutting RSUs, and my manager literally told me "due to budget constraints they are going to scrutinize promos very heavily going forward." But! I don't work at a FAANG or an AI firm or anywhere with an extreme performance culture either. So regardless of YOE, if you're skilled, motivated, and a little lucky, you can really shine...

tyleo 4mo ago

I hit principal pretty early on in my career. I keep a detailed work history for anyone interested in what that journey is like: https://www.tyleo.com/professional-work-history https://www.tyleo.com/professional-work-history It's both hustle and luck. One reason I left Microsoft was because I wasn't on track there. The organization was good but also top heavy so there wasn't room for growth. When I joined Rec Room the tech I built really clicked and the company scaled rapidly. Our team became critical and helped hundreds of coworkers advance their goals. I've heard another principal engineer describe this as, "being pulled into the white hot burning center of a company". As far as I can tell there's no "trick" to hitting the role. I'd describe it more as, "repeatedly move mountains". There's some luck identifying the right mountains and luck + hustle moving them at all.

Loughla 4mo ago
I like the insight of luck combined with incredible talent. Too many people get a bad taste in their mouth by leaders who only attribute success to hard work and dedication. Knowing what battles to really fight and die for is a talent in and of itself, but it's also a bit of luck to both have access to systems to allow you to impact important projects and also to end up impacting the right ones. It's very frustrating to be able to have a massive impact, but not get any sort of notice for it. Many people just start punching a clock when that happens. I've done it.
holden_nelson 4mo ago
Thanks for sharing. Really impressive journey, congrats and nicely done. I touched on it a little bit in my post but yeah I can not overstate the role of luck, both "internal luck" (do I have a good manager) and "external luck" (did I choose the right offer out of college). I mean sure, pat myself on the back for doing well in my intern interview, doing well in the internship and getting the return offer, doing well when I returned after school, etc... but I was damn lucky that recruiter plucked my resume out of the stack and put it on the "send a coding screen" pile when I was still in school. So yeah, the way I view it is that you have to be ready to take advantage when the luck breaks your way.

theteapot 4mo ago

Congratulations. It made me remember how proud I was when I became a Senior, and then earned my Super Engineer shortly after. Just recently I've earned my Extreme Engineer title. Good luck on your journey.

holden_nelson 4mo ago
Thanks! Good luck as you work your way towards Scrum Master ;)

mnmnmn 4mo ago

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ookblah 4mo ago

i was "cto" at 26 (lol). point being outside of securing a better pay package and using it for job networking purposes your "title" is largely irrelevant as a measure against yourself. don't rely too much on some company handing you a title to determine how skilled you are.

holden_nelson 4mo ago

Author here. I just started blogging this year. Been really interesting to see a post get some traction and read everyone's responses. Thank you all for reading. I left out a detail that might be relevant? Maybe not? I couldn't decide. SWE is actually a second career for me. I flunked out of college when I was 19, spent most of my 20s working as a chef, and then graduated college and started this job at 29. So I'm 31 now. So it's been funny to read things like "Congrats to this kid" haha. If the post was about _how_ I got promoted that fast, I'm pretty sure this ^ would be the #1 reason. I'd already been programming for like 10 years when I started this job. People paid me (almost nothing) to write software that they still use today (much to my chagrin - it wasn't very good). So I felt like I had a "head start" compared to most of my intern cohort (though, to be clear, I still to this day feel very behind, in general).

menno-sh 4mo ago
> I'd already been programming for like 10 years when I started this job The first 6-12 months after university are largely about 'learning how to work'. I'd say getting that out of the way is a pretty nice head start.

reflection42 4mo ago

Wonderful to see a worked example of self-reflection to help uncover what is personally important in work. As many will know, this kind of reflection is close to one of the pivotal exercises recommended in Richard Bolles valuable book on choosing a career or next career step “What Color is your Parachute“.