Aditya Agarwal Posted on May 30 Senior developer" after 3 years is title laundering # career # culture # startup # hiring Startups hand out senior titles like candy. The industry pays the price. I have been doing interviews for about a year now, and I cannot escape this pattern. Someone denotes themselves as a “Senior Engineer,” they have some number of years of experience—perhaps three—and they cannot provide an intelligent explanation of how a basic concept works, e.g. database indexes. This is not a fluke. It’s an epidemic. The Numbers Don't Lie Based on data from levels.fyi, on average, it takes between four to seven years to be promoted to a senior engineering position at a FAANG company. For startups, the average is three years, and in some cases, two years. That discrepancy is not due to rounding numbers. That's a completely different definition of the same word. Startups resort to this approach for obvious reasons. Since they cannot offer competitive salaries, they use titles as a competitive advantage. For instance, a 25-year-old engineer who would be hired at Google as L4 gets the title of “Senior Engineer” in a 15-person startup. This is a win-win situation as it doesn’t cost anything to the startup and the employee feels like getting a promotion. The real problem surfaces once this engineer decides to leave the startup and look for a new job. What "Senior" Actually Means The title isn't about writing code faster. It never was. A senior engineer mentors juniors without being asked. A senior engineer pushes back on product when the proposed timeline is fantasy. A senior engineer makes architectural decisions they'll have to live with for years and accepts that responsibility. Here's what I see instead from many three-year "seniors": → They can build features but can't design systems → They defer to product on every technical decision → They've never mentored anyone because the startup had no juniors → They've never navigated a codebase they didn't bui
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