5 years for junior for better or worse is well out of step with the industry - while you're right that you can get some massively inflated titles that are out of step with the norm, the norm is that you're an intermediate developer at a minimum and most likely a senior after 5 years.
I have to read a lot of cv's and the job title part is just some empty noise for me. Developer, engineer, programmer they're just terms that go in and out of fashion. At first they will become more and more pompous, Senior 10x-Ninja, or whatever, until they become so ridiculous that the actual capable people will call themselves humbly just a programmer.
Actually I think its pretty rare to even have a junior title nowadays. You can claim anyone with less than 2 YOE is a junior or whatever but when jobs require you to “hit the ground running” AKA run migrations in prod and resolve things when shit hits the fan then you’re not really doing junior level work.
Of course, there are also junior level jobs by responsibility but not title.
Intermediate/mid for sure, but if I get a resume from someone whose first programming job was 2018 and they're calling themselves senior, I'm throwing that in the trash unless like you said they're from VC-funded startups that are going to have massive title inflation and they're applying for a realistic (mid-level) role.
That doesn't seem fair, and it doesn't seem like an effective filter, either. Titles vary wildly for a lot of different reasons, and you can't expect candidates to present themselves to you in your terms. You can't expect them to take your job descriptions at face value, either. If mismatched title expectations bother you, blame the industry, blame other companies, blame hiring managers, but don't blame an engineer who has only been working for five years. It's on you to explain how titles and compensation work at your company and work out what their position would be.
I wouldn't pigeonhole someone into a level based on their years of experience or previous job titles, either. Interviews can reveal some surprising things. I've worked with people with less than five years of experience who were senior-quality developers at all aspects of the job, and I've worked with people with ten years of experience who just wanted to sit in their cube and write code without making any decisions or talking to anyone except their boss. And these people aren't going to straightforwardly tell you what their position should be. The one who wants to sit in his cube with no responsibilities might tell you he's senior (and his resume might back that up) and the one who is ready for a senior position might tell you they're mid-level, because at their last job they worked with extraordinary people.
Along similar lines to what you are saying, I think one of the more general problems that I see with titles is that people do tend to gravitate around specific industries/sizes of companies, even within IT, and then tend to associate their own experience as "normal" when it comes to seniority.
I've moved a bit between different sizes and government vs startup vs mid-sized etc, and the titles vary wildly.
Some government jobs had people with 4 years experience be "senior" or even "tech leads" because they weren't paying enough so they simply promoted any bright spark that was going to last to senior roles so they could at least get a few more years out of them before they left, as HR wouldn't pay more money without them getting the a specific title.
Other place I've worked, your title was essentially a lottery system, others you were hard pressed to be a Senior without anything less than 10 years experience.
But each of those places, I encountered people with very specific ideas of exactly what a senior was, and they were convinced their own standards were the "accepted" ones.
There are definitely general guidelines for senior, associate etc, but they aren't normalised, just like you are saying.
So point is, in support of your post, you can't dismiss someone just based on the title they give themselves, as it might have been perfectly normal thing to call themselves in previous positions.
That's a great point, that VC-funded startups aren't the only sources of title inflation. Salary bands at bigger companies also fuel inflation. I worked for a startup that got acquired by a large bureaucratic company, and I ended up as a principle engineer -- along with two other engineers on my team. It was the only way to keep paying us what we had been making as senior engineers at the startup. It was a director-level title, so my boss technically had a lower title than me. When I decided to leave that company, I was looking at senior-level positions at startups, because that was the equivalent to the job I was doing as a director-level IC at BigCorp.
Large multinational banks are particular offenders here. IIRC, the rough equivalent grade for a Big Tech(TM) senior in JP Morgan (or maybe Goldman? one of those) is VP. Staff is MD or something!
It wouldn't be unusual to be an E5 at Facebook (err, sorry, "Meta") after 5 years, which is considered "senior" level. The point I'm making is that this title inflation has happened more broadly than just at VC-funded startups.
I was hired at L5 at Meta in 2011, they’ve done a pretty good job at keeping the bar high but it’s mathematically impossible for it to stay at 2011 levels on multi order of magnitude growth.
Back when I was even bothering in Jan/Feb it was me and 20 other L8s interviewing for the same L6 opening. It’s a coin toss at that point.
Price discovery is not functioning at the moment, there are plenty of theories why.
But high-end tech hiring is a slot machine and will be until monetary policy lets the bond market stabilize a bit.
Your comment is almost completely incomprehensible to me, as someone that doesn't work in the Meta context...
I take it being an L5 is a good thing? but just six months ago you were an L8, and competition to become an L6 was a coin toss? No idea what 'price discovery' could mean in this situation, other than a fairly weird way to say 'salary range'? And any of this having to do with 'the bond market' is just baffling!
The reason I bring it up is that I'm genuinely curious what life is like in other corners of the tech world. Any way you could translate the above into non-Meta terms?
> I worked at Facebook for 4 years and also don't understand that comment.
I have never worked for FB and I thought it was fine. None of that is FB-specific.
> I take it being an L5 is a good thing?
It's implied lower numbers are better.
>> it was me and 20 other L8s interviewing for the same L6 opening
> but just six months ago you were an L8, and competition to become an L6 was a coin toss?
Yes, due to the number of people competing for the same position.
> No idea what 'price discovery' could mean in this situation, other than a fairly weird way to say 'salary range'?
Salary range implies stability. eg What a company is willing to pay for what positions. There has been a lack of standardization in talent across tech and instability in compensation. Another way to think of it is an increased risk tolerance in wages. This has been fueled by leniency in promotion/raises/hiring when profits were higher.
> And any of this having to do with 'the bond market' is just baffling!
Monetary policy (around interest rates) is directly related to profit margins and hiring. Suffice to say, this is common knowledge for anyone who owns property (beyond a car, maybe) or tracks the job market.
Can you further elaborate on why monetary policy is directly related to profit margins?
My understanding is that monetary policy / interest rates is controlled by the FED. When they raise rates then money is more expensive, therefore profit margins shrink, and the hiring bar has to increase.
I was 35 years old before I had the faintest idea how money works, like even a little.
And the only way I learned even a little is because I lived in NYC for a bit and ended up hanging with a bunch of Street cats after work, who laugh their asses off about how clueless we all are (in that moment personified by yours truly).
But you get a few G&Ts into them and they’re pretty happy to teach you Econ 101.
https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Facebook,Amazon,Google&track... says higher numbers are better (more senior, more highly paid) at Facebook, so maybe the GGP post is talking about working at Meta, leaving, and then coming back to apply for a less senior role than they'd had previously? It confused me.
Ah one minor critique, you didn’t tell them about the last time the same office that goes after terrorism and money laundering and stuff took time out of their day and busted all these same firms for wage fixing in the ancient days of just over ten years ago in federal court.
We overlapped in NY. But assuming your username is your real name, I don’t remember you. I worked mostly on iOS infra stuff (crash reporting, battery usage tracking, etc).
They were hired as a level 5 over a decade ago. They got promoted a bunch until they were level 8. At some point they left. Now they are trying to come back. The market is so bad that they have lowered their standards and are only applying for level 6 roles. Still a bunch of other level 8s are competing for that lower level job so the chance of them getting it is lower.
The bond market/interest rate comment is saying this is part of why the economy is bad.
Price discovery I am not that confident in the meaning. I think it means companies and candidates are having a hard time figuring out what each other are worth. So you have highly skilled people not getting the offer numbers they want because their skills are not being recognized.
L8 is a bit of a guess. I was an L7 five years ago and have been training hard since. Maybe I’m still a 7.
I think you and I are thinking similarly about price discovery. Markets get disrupted, it’s not unprecedented or anything, but in general there’s some price between zero and infinity that a person can make, and seeing that go from X to “no transaction” abruptly is less ideal than it going from X to X - Y because supply and/or demand changed.
Well behaved pricing curves are existential in a bunch of really key markets, to the point that institutions preserve those properties.
Whether one is a tech worker or a struc steel pro or a teacher, anything, it seems a weird exception to “we need differentiable pricing curves here”.
Can you further elaborate on "price discovery" and how monetary policy interfaces with the bond market?
Also, curious to better understand how you interpret monetary policy and bond markets ultimately impacting high-end tech hiring in a more concrete example.
The second slash third questions are easier. In the US at least (and many other modern monetary systems) the money supply (it can be measured lots of ways, in the US a number called M2 is usually a good default) is (mostly) manipulated/guided by what are called “open market operations”. When lay people say “The Fed” they usually mean the “The Federal Open Market Committee”. Open market operations are give or take buying or selling US sovereign debt (a privileged kind of bond) to push the price up or down and therefore the yield (interest rates) down or up. Almost all interest rates are directly or indirectly indexed to US sovereign debt (Treasurys, etc.) and because of the way that money enters and leaves the system via lending activity (which is a whole topic), that “benchmark” interest rate “target” roughly increases the availability of money to say hire people or build a factory, or decreases it because too much money is chasing too little productivity (AKA inflation).
From roughly 2009-2022, the “benchmark” target was ~0, a policy position called ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy). This might have made a little sense to like, avoid a depression in the 2009 housing-originated (ha!) financial crisis, but it turned out that running the economy in this super whacky way drove asset bubbles in a bunch of stuff which is an effective wealth transfer from people without serious estates to people with them. This was very popular with the sort of people who decide stuff. There’s this other whole can of worms called “easing” (QE) that arguably made the target rate negative, also a whole other topic.
For reasons that I haven’t heard a persuasive explanation for, beginning in roughly March of 2022 the FOMC started cranking this target up (selling a ton of bonds) and is still doing it, the most recent increase in the target was 2 days ago.
This is going to slow economic activity and on paper inflation, but the effects will usually be felt first and most in what are called “growth” sectors, basically stuff where the value is perceived to be largely in the future rather than the present. With a healthy hand-wave, “software” is a “growth” sector, which is why 500k tech people can be fired in 6 months and the Wall St. Journal can still keep sort of a straight face that labor markets are strong. There is a roaring demand for gig workers who don’t get dental.
This is already too long, so if you want my personal opinion on price discovery in elite software talent markets, reply to indicate it and I’ll write a mother micro-blog :)
I absolutely do want the follow up to price discovery in elite software talent markets. That said, if this is something better discussed over a beer I've gone ahead and sent you an email :+1:
Is following this kind of info a hobby of yours? I find it fascinating, but I can’t imagine how learning enough to have a truly informed opinion about these topics could be actually useful to me.
Eh, I mean I guess ultimately I’m just kind of a nerd.
I will say that understanding a modicum of finance (I’m certainly no RenTech quant!) is basically a prerequisite for understanding politics, sociology, war, energy, technology, pretty much everything.
One doesn’t need a ton, but being able to give or take eyeball whether the market believes e.g. Powell is kinda table stakes.
And it’s just insane this isn’t taught broadly. I learned even just my modicum mostly by improbable random chance.
decision makers making blanket generalizations because candidates don't fit the mold they've invented in their own minds using only their personal experience as a baseline.
tech experience is wildly diverse. looking at candidates with a one size fits all approach is passing up plenty of qualified people, but everybody wants to hire like Google.
Sure, I guess my point is to consider the context of the person applying. If they are coming from a place with title inflation, it's not their fault that the company they worked for inflated titles. If you're exclusively hiring seniors and they are an inflated "senior", for sure you're under no obligation to hire them, but if you're open to intermediates, I think it's worth explaining how your titles might differ from their experiences and that intermediate is a better fit.
I don’t even have titles on my resume. Everything is “software developer” or occasionally something slightly different if I think it’s relevant to the particular work I did there.
It's dumb, but it is the standard nowadays.