I’ve seen people call themselves “senior” after 3 years on the job, other become CTOs in the same time, and others still have a senior title after 20(!) years in the industry yet have a fuckton of technical experience.
I’ve heard that they are all just titles and opinions from “if you don’t have the technical skill you can’t call yourself a senior”, to “senior and staff are just a feeling, principal is the actual senior” and “staff? above senior? we call that manager”.
What’s your story? Is there a ladder? Do you feel like you belong on it? Where are you on it? Does it make sense? Did you see major bumps in salary? Did titles count at all?
My first tech job ever, I was a senior developer after 4 years because I was the primary for a lot of projects.
When I jumped to another job, I kept my salary but they used levels. So I wasn’t “technically” a senior there, my level was higher than regular devs, but lower than all the experienced devs.
Then I jumped jobs again, higher salary and then I became a Individual Contributor. IC are also ranked in levels. So I was still higher than regular devs, but I was not a senior IC.
That for some reason lead be back to team lead, and now I run a entire department of 30 people. I’m still not a senior dev officially. I’m dept lead, which means I’m mostly organizing people and code, have team leads report back to me and jumping into solve critical issues.
I’ve been programming for almost 14+ years? So I guess I’m a senior developer, even if I was only given that title in my first job.