What does "Senior" Software Engineer mean? (From a Senior Software Engineer)

Thank you to Formation and Sophie for partnering with me on this video! Formation is an online fellowship helping early career software engineers break into top tier companies like Google, Dropbox and Lyft. Every Fellowship is custom tailored to each Fellow's specific career goals and incoming skill levels so that our mentorship and training is targeting the Fellow's specific skill gaps. All Fellows are supported unconditionally until they have a signed offer letter, with ongoing feedback and mentorship from senior engineers from the top companies in the world. Find out more here: fm.dev/r6q
🔖c h a p t e r s 🔖
00:00 - Intro
01:35 - What does Senior SWE mean?
03:12 - Is the title misleading?
06:27- How company resources impact the title
08:20 - Things you can work on
08:55 - How/When do you know when you're a Senior SWE?
10:10 - Resources to help you
12:28 - Outro
💖 m o r e m a y u k o 💖
Become a member and support my channel: kzbin.infojoin
Merch: store.hellomayuko.com
Muko's Corner Podcast: anchor.fm/mayuko-inoue
Hanko (My iOS Developer Academy): academy.hanko.tech
My Newsletter: news.hellomayuko.com
Instagram: / hellomayuko
Twitter: / hellomayuko
Japanese KZbin Channel: / @mayuko2271
🛠m y g e a r 🛠 (affiliate)
COMPUTER(similar): geni.us/zgTMbP3
KEYBOARD: geni.us/2Y17p
MOUSE: geni.us/QRIoB
MONITOR: geni.us/DSpK
DESK PAD: bit.ly/2UvPQd1
MY AMAZON STORE: www.amazon.com/shop/mayuko
🌱r e s o u r c e s🌱
Levels.fyi Salary Negotiation service! (affiliate) www.levels.fyi/services/?ref=...
🎧m u s i c 🎧
Music provided by Chillhop: chillhop.com/listen
Chillhop on Spotify: bit.ly/ChillhopSpotify
🌸a b o u t 🌸
Mayuko Inoue is a content creator and Software Engineer. After working in Silicon Valley tech companies like Intuit, Patreon, and Netflix for six years as an iOS Engineer, she became a full-time creator in 2020. Her work aims to help people find their way through the tech industry by sharing her own experiences navigating this world through technology, career advice, and lifestyle videos. She is passionate about discussions around mental health, cultural identity, and creating technology with empathy and compassion.
✉️c o n t a c t ✉️
If you'd like to sponsor or work together on a video: [e-mail]
Other business inquiries: [e-mail]
www.hellomayuko.com
This video was sponsored by Formation.

[@sanchini5689]

I prefer Señor Software Engineer

[@luisv8887]

😂😂

[@xboxer808]

You have to write all documentation in Spanish

[@iwatch311]

lol

[@gtdmg489]

@@xboxer808 Si señor

[@ClassicGameSessions]

Upvoted 😂

[@alankwanHI]

I’ll share my experiences as hiring manager. While the monikers like junior/senior aren’t very well defined in general, it is almost universally used to indicate someone who no longer needs instructions from the supervisor. Once they are informed of the what, a senior can design, plan, assign resources, oversee the development processes, all the way to completion. Please note that a senior is not just a good engineer. The work above encapsulates various peripheral aspects of software development: architecture, design patterns, resource management, training, supervision, source code management, release management, issue & problem management, testing, QA, coordination with other teams (operations, networking, security, etc.). A senior engineer is someone on track to leave the engineering field (if that’s what s/he wants) to either management or architecture. When I train my seniors, I no longer train them on engineering matters. My expectation is that they know all that. I train them on all the peripherals skills above, both hard skills and soft skills. I know a senior is a senior when s/he start to minimize the work of a supervisor so the super can spent time dealing with their peers and bosses. The more issue a worker generate for the super, the less senior-looking the worker is. In a well defined job family environment, all the seniors are defined in similar manner: 1) They are completely skilled in their own craft, 2) they can lead their own team and coordinate with all other teams, 3) all they need from the super are resources and conflict management/resolution.

[@pbdivyesh]

This is a really articulate comment, Thanks for sharing that, as I'm in a transition phase, I am literally handling all these on my own, but since I don't understand most of the DB or DBT transformation related thing, I do gather the Data team to solve the problem and as you said that should be on me once the issue/solution is known. Thanks once again.

[@archmad]

you know you are senior when your peer is the one asking you a lot of questions

[@poloska9471]

If you have a moment, could you please touch on what "conflict management/resolution" is in point #3 of your last paragraph? I feel like if I Google the answer to this I won't get a satisfactory or straight-forward enough answer in this context. Thank you!

[@ramzindhinosilva43]

@@poloska9471 The meaning of "Conflict management/resolution" is dealing with unfortunate politics or road-blockers that require cross-functional teams to complete/participate in your task.

[@heymikey1981]

It's strange -- I work with someone who was promoted to senior last year and I still have to explain to her what to do and why her initial design is bad and inefficient.

[@sotirikolvani]

The title "Senior" has been confusing & frustrating for many people including myself. Senior software engineers are experienced employees who would usually take the lead in projects related to software development. Every company, has their own definition of Seniority which means that someone can be called a Senior faster in some companies than others depending on the developer's experience level and the company's view. For example, in my case, as a Junior I would work mostly around fixing bugs, ghosting a senior experienced engineer & pair programming and work on small tasks. As a mid level I would have a bit more ownership into the projects and I would provide more results and complete more tasks for the team. Now, as a Senior I own part of the projects as Sophie mentioned which makes me focus more on the technical structure, architecture, design patterns, and reviewing code for the team to produce as clean & efficient code as possible. Think of it like life, the more we grow up, the more seniors we become which means that we automatically get more responsibilities as adults as we have to take care of our own life and things become harder and more challenging every day, but at the same time, we become more experienced.

[@Sd-rn6yv]

It’s funny because in my company I already do all the Senior things you mentioned but working as Junior.

[@sharkpyro93]

@@Sd-rn6yv maybe you work for a startup / small company, that is a bit different

[@rhkilis]

Sophie's point about impact being the differentiator between a senior and a non-senior is correct from my own experience. I'm more of a system administrator rather than a software engineer, but the moment I was promoted to senior, there was more expectation that I should be contributing a lot more in helping define team priorities and roadmaps. There was more reliance on me to ideate solutions rather than build them because I was expected to understand best practices and to know the pros and cons of building one solution versus the other. My direct manager is coming to me for answers, rather than telling me the answers.

[@IxionwinG]

Incredibly timely video, Mayuko! You dropped this literally right when I was strugglebussing to get into a senior role, and now that I’m about to actually hop into it at another company, I’m really sweating about it. Thanks for presenting these perspectives - the concept of seniority really does get frustratingly vague, so any insight at all helps!

[@scarpa12]

This was a really good discussion of what "Senior" means, I myself became a "Senior Engineer" at a startup in lieu of an actual pay increase. "Startup titles" we used to call them. It took me many years to internalize that maybe I *was* a Senior engineer! I wanted to add a bit of insight and advice specifically related to my perspective on interviewing candidates for both Junior (yes we do hire them!) and Senior roles. In simplest terms, we expect Senior people to already know what we want them to and to join our company ready to work immediately, with maybe a short ramp-up to learn company specific practices. As for Junior hires Sophie put it best, we don't expect anything more than "net-zero" for quite some time. I personally am mostly looking for motivation, willingness to learn and ability to communicate. My advice here for those seeking Junior or entry level positions is to be very honest with yourself that you *are* inexperienced. I will often ask questions that I know the candidate can't fully answer and that's OK! I see a lot of nervous candidates and fully understand that feeling, but the candidates who are able to honestly say "I don't know that" or better yet explain the limits of their knowledge of a subject stand out. Even if your knowledge is "I read a blog post about it" or "I've heard of it" that's good enough. For me I'm looking for a dialogue and trying to get a sense of how it will be to train and mentor that candidate should I recommend them for hire. If anyone is still reading, I do wish my company hired more Junior roles. It's an investment and a risk, but in my experience the colleagues I've witnessed go from Junior hires to experienced, solid contributors are the best ones to work with.

[@JonathanYeong]

Love this breakdown of what a senior engineer is. There’s roadmaps and resources for people beginning as developers, but as you get further on in your career things become much more fuzzy. Tying everything to impact makes a lot of sense!

[@amanewgirl]

Thank you so much for this video. It's made me realise that I was thrown into a senior dev position in my company with no support, props when I succeeded or mentoring to know what to do now I'm here. Gives me confidence in knowing what I bring to the table as I start to look for jobs elsewhere and what I should be looking for/ to do when I complete the transition

[@cody_codes_youtube]

Man. The title and the expectations are so different between companies, Indistries, teams. Which also makes it hard to understand from the outside or even when you’re switching jobs. Thanks for sharing this video.

[@Anja5233]

This video really reassured me as a junior and now I have a clearer understanding, thank you so much

[@kayteeflick]

I LOVE your hair!! This style looks fantastic on you!

[@hellomayuko]

Thank you Kaytee 🥰🥰🥰

[@youngsuit]

i watched this today in prep for my senior interview and i appreciate your ability to navigate the system while also criticizing it

[@cjchang6569]

As a Senior software engineer/team lead at a large tech company in Silicon Valley: Great stuff! Yes impact is definitely a key factor to get promoted to senior. For large organizations that can mean exposure at the executive and customer facing level. For me, being the go to person is definitely needed for a good senior, i.e. answer questions and do code reviews of junior/entry team members. A great senior is someone that can lead a team well, i.e. soft skills. Training and mentoring junior team members. A great senior should also be able to identify important problems from the big picture, design a solution from that picture at the code level and direct+help a team to deliver the solution. The soft skills/team element is HUGE for a great senior, just my take :)

[@sahilaujla]

I didn't know about FORMATION. Thank you for this amazing opportunity. I will apply when I feel I am prepared.

[@dartthewarrior]

This is a great video! As someone who is/was a senior at two mega tech / fang level companies, I agree that the senior role sounds nice but really it simply means that you are the go to on something / are a SME in 1 or multiple areas.

[@PeterElbaum]

Sophie's definition of "impact" is interesting and largely aligns with my experience - at my current job, we say seniors are "force multipliers." That said, I've found that seniority is largely a function of mindset. I've known people with two years experience that had senior-level impact even if they didn't have the title. And definitely agree that problem solving skills and working independently are a huge part of that. Love your videos - keep it up! :)

[@R5123]

Nice Mayuko! I'm a first time listener, but I like your style and content! Nice job!!

[@martinmj94]

Very timely video! I’m weeks away from launching 2.0 of the app and having recently passed 1 year as a «junior» I’m curious where to position myself if I were to join another company. The sponsor also seemed really interesting! Should consider sending in an application around spring next year.

[@2764tsuna]

This video was really helpful! And the helpful comments here also came thanks to this video. Thanks alot!

[@AlanLe]

Wow, great discussion. I like viewing the term Senior based on their "impact" to the project. I find that Senior Devs tends to own certain features when they're tasked to it. They're also can work through their tasks self-sufficiently . I like Sophie's point about when companies saying that they're only looking for senoir devs means that they might not having bandwidth to invest in junior devs at the moment. It often takes more effort to get a junior dev into net positive position. A junior dev might take longer to finish a task and it might take several tries before it's done correctly.

[@AssadJawaid]

You're a mind reader! I'm looking into a Data Scientist/Analytics position and mostly here in Japan all I come across are Senior positions. A bit of a let down but your video helps perfectly with this.

[@mintri1199]

It's kinda weird that I've met Sophie before watching this video. She's a badass programmer and an awesome mentor.

[@Metruzanca]

This is exactly what I'm focussing on now, having an impact and becoming the goto guy for multiple areas (small company, so I can conceivably own more of the product's codebase). I'm aiming for senior. I want the sastisfaction of either the promotion, from all the hard work I'm doing to improve the product.

[@anantaraha5826]

Thanks for discussing such a topic. Beside programming, management and problem solving skills are also needed to define "Senior".

[@saintnight9792]

based on my observations and experiences, being a "Senior Engr. / Dev" is someone who can mentor and importantly keep business in mind, Junior Engr. / Dev clings more on the technical side, they keep on asking the "whats" and "hows", while Seniors are more like on the "why" side

[@lostman65]

I've been a senior software engineer for about 15 years and an System Architect for about 5. At first, i felt like these titles, just reflected how many years i've been in the business. After observing others, I started noticing that "years-in-the-business" had little to do with impact-fulness. in other words, some younger SWE were killing it, and quickly became leads, while more experienced SWE were not capable nor interested in becoming a leads. I've done a lot of hiring over the years and here is what i look for: 1. Basic experience in software development. Working in teams...etc 2. A good familiarity of most things software. 3. The humbleness to know that you don't know everything, but the confidence to know that you can figure anything out.

[@lostman65]

@Hatwox yeah… it may have different meaning in different context however. e.g. society of women engineering

[@nathanril6345]

Thank you soo much, this video helped me alot, keep it up

[@________1516]

I really liked this video! It was very informative! Thank you!

[@alvinwan889]

OMG, it’s sooo nice your hair cut😍😂 really good for u👍🏻👍🏻

[@FableCountry]

i'm a "senior" SDET at a big company but only in title. i still work on junior to mid-level engineer tasks. it's overwhelming at times and i feel guilty to have this title, even if it feels good to know that my company thinks that I deserve it. i think this also comes down to how i was in a department that i was the 'go-to person' but that team was dissolved due to budget so i was shoehorned into another team. and have felt lost since then

[@tatan1994]

A senior engineer is also very focused of being a mentor for juniors to become seniors too. Is not only having the knowledge, is the skill of sharing it and mind of what is the most important for the business

[@ClassicGameSessions]

Thank you for elaborating 👍

[@marangonicow2315]

This is an excellent video and has explained a lot to me. I've just attained a PhD in Mathematics, where I wrote a substantial codebase for numerically solving fluid dynamics problems. The solution I ended up adopting involved interacting with an API for some numerical solutions, and writing a whole new database structure and developing my own algorithms for optimising computational performance and identifying the best way to parallelise my code. Havnig enjoyed the coding aspect of my PhD the most, I wanted to move into a software engineering role in industry. I presumed that as I haven't had industry experience, I would jump in at a junior software engineer level, and applied for a position as such. To my surprise, the company returned to me with an offer at a senior level. But, having done some research, the whole 'critical analysis + project management + impact + independence' critera for identifying what level you should be operating at makes the offer make an awful lot more sense!

[@EntertheBlackDragon]

Such a nice video. Don't want to say too much here but I've been on my Sr. Software Engineering game for a while now. Every environment that I've walked into, I take it as personal responsibility to study the entire codebase and create my own personal documentation on all of the capabilities and features the application(s) have to offer. What they do, how they work, what their main purposes are. Doing what I've been doing for over a decade I can still say that my most valuable problem solving tools are still a notepad and a pen. In each instance I've been the "go to" person on every complex matter of either applications and sometimes networks and security. When there's that "down time" of a discussion about what people used to do before they got "here". Sometimes my history slips out that I used to be a network administrator with a background in security and the I.T. guys all of a sudden like to come around my workspace more often and give me "hypotheticals" to solve in the minor back and forth banter. It's not that I wish to say I'm the guy that knows everything. But I've had to be that sole engineer who's had to know everything at different companies. So now everywhere I go, there's this thing where people look to me to have complex answers to complex problems. I don't mind it so much but the supervisors and managers do. They never like the fact that when my peers or I.T. staff come directly to me to ask simple or complex problems that I ask the right questions and in that line of questioning the answers or solutions are found. This may be what makes me a Sr. Software Engineer but this also gets me "fired" or "terminated" from my employment due to insecurities within my field. No one in management likes a "know it all". The issue is that when they interview you and hire you they want a team player. They often frown on the "superstar" or the stand outs. This is why I've pursued work from home because I can avoid the messy "insecure" supervisor bit. I'm done with that. I just want to work like everyone else and solve as many problems as I can without ruffling any feathers. Yes I am always willing to dedicate my time to educating younger developers, or even less experienced ones. But I do not enjoy being scolded and disrespected by management in order to "put me in my place" because they feel as if I'm "too confident" in my knowledge. Anyway, I said I wasn't going to say too much and look what happend..... oh well.

[@Randomusername262]

Yeah I just got promoted to a senior level for my job and have noticed I was the main contact for many things. It's interesting seeing my progression of just being a random to being a point of contact if issues arrive.

[@hueypautonoman]

I was hired as an intermediate analyst and then promoted to senior in only two years because I was quickly considered a SME (subject matter expert), but I feel like that is an exception at my organization where they're more likely to hire a senior directly from outside rather than promote from within, leaving junior and intermediate people frustrated at the inability to move up.

[@manuakasam]

> more likely to hire a senior directly from outside rather than promote from within While this certainly holds true for some companies I would argue that the mayority of companies actually treat their employees right. Sadly though it's a fact that many people do the job of a software engineer as a 9-5 and I'm sorry to say but with this mentality you'd never be able to get promoted - and why should you? As you pointed out you managed to become an SME and that certainly isn't because you just "did your job". Certainly you'd have spent many hours trying to understand what you're doing and get better at it. This is something that I see lacking in many people at my current employer. They do the job, they get the job done but the quality of it and the understanding simply isn't on point. People are confronted with an error message "error blabla, run composer foo:bar" and they don't know what to do, crying helpless messages into company slack instead of trying to figure it out.

[@hueypautonoman]

@@manuakasam Fair point. I can't even count how many times I've been in training with my co-workers and everybody learns how something works, but I'm the one who has to ask why. I'm not comfortable just going through the motions without understanding the applications I support, especially if I'm asked to do work on a production server.

[@MBXD001]

Mayuko i love you for bringing us Sophie. see this is why i love your channel you always bring us the connection

[@jeselreyes1938]

Thank you for this! :)

[@monome3038]

recently I've been laid off for being a junior after 2 months of working for a startup! They said they need a senior developer now... This is a great video topic, Thank youu!!

[@coder4life]

sound like a horrible company

[@juniask]

@@coder4life agree

[@incompetentdev5830]

So many startups led by non technical people view their devs as disposable or like factory workers. Then they wonder why their product ended up being garbage

[@johnmarkson1998]

@@incompetentdev5830 or they could end up the next big company because they hired the right senior developer at the right time. its a risk that companies have to take because of how competitive the field is.

[@froggin-zp4nr]

Lack of patience from management and lead developers when it comes to onboarding new developers to teams is a failure on their part. They think getting a senior to help will fix things for them faster but that senior dev will probably get the same problems you have, and they won't all be technical skill limitations

[@mockdux]

Very helpful topic, I have observed role names being leveraged to attract talent too. It's valuable to put on a resume.

[@wranther]

Very clean and informative video Mayuko! Between you and Sophie there exists a helpful interaction of goal setting to achievement. Nice healthy appearing plant basking in the bright light behind you too. But what about the cactus sitting on the piece of pipe waving at the back of its head in the mirror over your left shoulder? Stay Healthy and Positive! -Bob...

[@wagnermoreira786]

wow FORMATION is awesome! thanks for sharing!

[@MIDNightPT4]

Sophie back at it 🐐

[@Sam-tt3qc]

Great video, and I got here by looking at keyboard review videos of all things. Thank you!

[@retr0477]

I just got hired as a Senior Software Engineer. Even though I consider myself a Mid-Level and actually got scared at first, but it's all a learning challenge. I think this is where I learn the most out of it. Thanks for your Video M :)

[@haidar6280]

Tell us about your interview experience and what did you do to prep to succeed? What questions were asked and what was your methodology of response?

[@alexjay9987]

Bump! I’m a Jr. Full stack Engineer. In my previous company I was on route to get promoted to Professional (Mid level) but a lot of my senior colleagues mentioned that my impact was of a Senior. (Owned multiple high impact projects, mentored and trained onboarding engineers at all levels, assisted with roadmap planning and created epics and stories for the team to pick up, was a technical lead and a point of contact, ran learning sessions and all that jazz). Currently I’m applying to Senior roles and would love to hear what made you successful in the interviews, thanks!

[@AsifAlli]

Senior Engineers are senior because of their experience, their ability to code cleanly, to use patterns, to have the wisdom to get to the root cause of the problem faster, the brain to solution, the insight to consider customer impact. They also are able to help the junior devs, coach them, help them to grow. Also companies want senior software engineers because they want to build a proper maintainable solution within certain constraints of a proposed architecture

[@Kinos141]

9:06, If that's the case, then I've been a "senior" engineer for a long time. I wrote a whole ETL system to save the company money transporting data from one vendor to another. Mind you, I work as IT.

[@NexusWargaming]

I actually just got promoted to a "Senior" before serving as six years as a "Advisory" software engineer. I spent the last three effectively doing what I got promoted for. That's a great way to think about getting that promotion...that you need to do the "Senior" job you before you get promoted to it. The view that scope and importance is more what makes you get that "senior" role. Generally, I view anything less than a senior are developers still learning how to code well and still needing help. Once you get to senior level, it becomes more about teaching others how to code well, as well as delivering on a finished product. When push comes to shove, that's the key difference...can you deliver on a finished product without the help of someone else. Can you be the one to take responsibility for a product's success. Someone who wants to be a Senior engineer should ask themselves if they have the ability to take a project and show that it was their work and leadership that was the main reason for its success. You have to be the one pushes the button to go to production.

[@uxdesigndiy]

Thanks for sharing this,. When I was "junior" as a designer I HATED seeing this on job posted for "Senior Designers." Now that I am "senior" I do mentor less experienced designers and I encourage them not to label themselves as "junior."

[@sergejsvisockis]

I am a Senior Software Engineer either :) Nice to hear from Senior Software Engineer :)

[@needamuffin]

I've never delineated between junior/senior as much as I have developer/engineer. To me, "developers" are more geared towards the scope of individual functionalities where as "engineers" have a higher level view and focus on the code as a whole and its configurability and reusability. In my current position, I own the whole code base of a major government website. I do little actual development at this point, although I do make time for specific functionalities that I am either 1) particularly a good fit for based on my skill set and knowledge level of the subject or 2) have taken a personal interest in (which usually means I can see the potential for an elegant, extensible solution for that becomes a personal challenge to find and implement), but the majority of my time is spent taking client requirements and translating that into structures and capabilities that are general enough to solve many potential issues in addition to the one at hand. In that sense, I consider myself more a software architect, even though that's not really a term I've seen used anywhere else but I think it more accurately describes what I do.

[@ts9971]

I work as a Senior IT admin. The main differences I see are meetings with vendors, the volume of meetings, taking accountability for projects, also direct impact on documentation and teaching juniors and peers on your knowledge base.

[@konstantin2387]

And thank you for making this video

[@grenadespoon]

When you’re a junior I feel that you are asking way more questions than you are answering. When you’re a senior you’re answering way more questions than you’re asking.

[@blackmage567]

Great video! How do you feel tech skills translate between different environments? For example, im a senior developer for a specific tool which uses some C but also its own langage and toolkit. I own most projects i work on completely. But if i want to dive into something different, i would be at a Jr Level, except for the fact that (i think based on very small projects i did) i do learn extremely fast compared to a fresh Jr with no experience. As in, i have no experience building games with c++ and sfml, but when i tried to do one, once i was past the basic tutorials (how to use sfml libraries and the basic game loop which is kind of a "pattern" for game dev) i could just advance it on my own and research maybe very specific things if i needed. Obviously it will not be Senior level code in terms of efficiency, but i can manage to make things work rather quickly. I was thinking about this because i am afraid of moving from my Sr position to a Jr position and be stuck with a Jr salary for a long time, but at the same time my current job is starting to get boring. (no im not looking to go into game development, that was just an example based on the last thing i did at home)

[@focusEngineered]

Thank you Mayuko, I always find your content is super useful and helpful to me. I've a question:How long should an engineer stay in one company? thanks

[@NoKingButChrist]

Depends on your values. If you are seeking absolute highest salary potential, maybe 2 years a piece. If you want more meaningful experience, relationships, commitment, and opportunities, as long as it works for you. Meaning it’s a good fit for you financially, geographically, socially, and personally. If that makes sense.

[@bianchialex]

I would like to see you talk about different subfeilds of software engineer. As a CS student I get to pick a certain amount of electives and I think I want to take classes about lower level systems in C.

[@andreslikesramen]

Very good information thanks for this.

[@Mathcartney]

meanwhile in the junior field where I live it is more or less like "we want a senior with an urge to work for a fresh graduated wage" hahaha good topic and talk, good to see how its like in other countries.

[@gamerjaebea5361]

It's important to remember that being a senior and being officially recognized as senior does not always go hand in hand. Getting the title can be a very subjective or loaded process. If your company does not have clearly defined rules on that promotion, you could be fighting a while before a manager chooses to officially recognize your impact. And since the promotion often comes with a pay increase, your recognition could be blocked by a refusal to spend more money for you.

[@iustinventaniuc8699]

The opposite situation is way more common. You often see people from smaller companies that have senior title and yet they only have 2-3 years of experience, no meaningful impact and no system design knowledge.

[@pemcodegame4918]

The engineer level titles vary by company. I've even seen people "downgrade" titles (in name) when they moved to a different company such as "staff" to "senior". Or change title when company restructured.

[@jimbojones8713]

great video bro, thanks

[@rivershuh]

Wait… I really just graduated from college May 2021 and got hired as a application developer. I have been collecting requirements, planning, coding, testing and deploying on my projects at my job. I’m in charge of the whole stack of the code base. So I have been doing ‘Senior’ level work this whole time 😮

[@AntonioLexanTeh]

Senior = a software engineer that can design (the codebase), build, test, a big feature / project by himself, making sure it meets all requirements, on TIME. Also can take care of writing technical documentation and analyze the feasibility or effort (time) needed for a new requirement.

[@fhjunior6183]

Thanks for the vid

[@lugia970]

Omg your hair looks so nice

[@CrashOverride332]

Yeah, I feel like the industry is a little out of control with titles. But I think this is a largely FAANG view of things, which I think Sophie alluded to. At a lot of companies, senior developer really is just more money for somebody who's been coding longer. At institutions like Facebook, Oracle, Goldman, you'd probably see more "seniors" taking on a management lite role.

[@kencortez6369]

As one who is extremely selective with the LIKE button on KZbin, I will have next be looking for carpal tunnel remedies for crushing that thumbs up button so hard. Subscribed.

[@averagehank2740]

I'm here cause your voice is relaxing

[@sebbejohansson]

I am 4 years into my actual career after school and I have finally gotten to Senior level.

[@sharrodjohnson336]

I think at the moment of one becoming a senior software developer/engineer the initiative at that point is to build your own team/think-tank within a company bringing more productive environment, or something like that...

[@carloscambon5402]

It is entertaining and educative to listen to you

[@darellarocho5729]

I was wondering about this very same topic. Could you also do a video on working remotely as a SWE?

[@hamsteroncoffee]

Such a great topic to discuss about! Thanks for this, Mayuko ❤️! Question: Does a senior software engineer also do other stuff than coding, like for example: going to interviews, hiring people, training people, etc? How much of his / her time should these other tasks take? I am trying to understand the dynamics here 😁

[@hellomayuko]

Definitely! This really depends on what each company defines as "Senior", since each company does it differently. In my experience, most senior engineers are also entrusted with conducting interviews for open roles, helping to train junior engineers and also their peers in areas that the senior engineer is an expert in, taking on project management duties, etc. Everyone goes about it a little differently depending on what their career goals are, but "senior" typically includes a more expanded set of responsibilities than just implementation. Check out some of the comments from others that do a great job of explaining this!

[@theencryptedpartition4633]

How do you think the Stallions were hired??? Thanks to Dinesh and Gilfoyle

[@sabrina6720]

Little late to the topic here but, I remember working on an application for a year and became the go-to person for all questions related to that, even though I had just been two years into my fulltime career. Now I'm working on a project where everyone around me has been working on the project for 5+ years and the technologies are all new to me so I guess I'm a junior now? Senior is a very confusing term for me.

[@zedfury887]

My company has a particular ratio of junior, mid, and senior level engineers that we try to maintain. A fleet of "senior" engineers without juniors is akin to having no seniors at all. I very much prefer when we hire juniors, as they can be molded and helped to grow into allstars. Seniors engineers are what they are at that point in my experience, and rarely change in any meaningful way.

[@chelinemagsano6185]

Would it be possible if you could cover how does a Mid dev differ from a Junior? I feel like everything is all about Junior and Senior but not much about Mid or transitioning to Mid? How do you know if you're not a Junior anymore?

[@Sith90lord]

this video feels like a kick in the nuts for me... as i pretty much am the "go-to-person" for pretty much anything in our framework and i hear (by accident) of new hires, that i have to put in a lot of time an effort into training, that they are being paid more than me...

[@anthonytam5633]

So how so you define “staff” engineers compared to “seniors”??

[@kamaboko1]

As a long time technical recruiter who has placed a lot of "Senior" engineers, IMO it depends on the company. For instance, a "Senior" engineer at Amazon would be an architect at other companies. They're responsible for every aspect of the SDLC, work directly with business partners, have complete product ownership, architect, lead the entire team, etc. At the same time I've worked with "Senior" engineers who work at small companies consisting of maybe five engineers. It most cases, those senior engineers have like two years of experience. IMO, they are not senior level. Telling them that though as they apply to a company with 1000+ engineers is nearly impossible to get through. In most instance that developer would be a Junior in a larger company. Furthermore, just because someone has been doing something for a long time doesn't make them "senior". This is how I explain it to developers. "I've been playing tennis for over 20 years, but I'm not competing at Wimbledon." Generally speaking, I have found that people who get hung up on titles aren't very good at what they do. If I had a penny for every dev who insisted they were a senior engineer, yet melted trying to create a recursive solution.

[@the_computer_scientist]

Hello Mayuko, are you by chance related to the @TechLead? Thank you for the video

[@countryclub1113]

At one large well-known entertainment company in LA that I worked at, in our office we had 2 employees who were "Directors" with no one working under them, and one "Manager" with no one working under them. They just sat at their desks working by themselves all day. I thought it was the strangest thing. So, I guess it's true they just hand out titles to attract and keep employees.

[@taironenunes5804]

I love this channel

[@onecient6198]

Mayuko, does all that you said is based in your experience in the USA, or you think the terms "Senior" and "Junior" applies to any country as well? I was wondering if these terms mean the same everywhere...

[@ksz7241]

Nice video, but if I understand correctly now I'm working in a small team working on a desktop app and I kind of am a person that people come to with some part of this app so I'm a senior, but if I were to recruit to google I would definitely go for junior, so in this definition "seniority" is project related and comes with time and commitment? So in this meaning, what is a "mid" developer?

[@coderandcream]

I have been struggling with this "Senior" thing, I have been in development for more than 15 years and I never had "Senior" next to my job title. But I have been working on 3 or more products and have been the "go-to" person whenever these products needs debugging or need additional features based on client requirements. I never made a big deal out of this "Senior" thing until recently when I felt that most "seniors" I know don't even know basic HTML/CSS

[@coder4life]

I think this senior title thing overrated.

[@ashen_dawn]

Senior to me tends to mean "more involved in planning and training than the juniors". Of course I'm already doing that and not senior so I don't know how well that lines up.

[@DemetriPanici]

I have always thought that the names of titles are interesting / odd. Great breakdown!

[@luisdavila7302]

Physics grad student 🙋🏽‍♂️ just interested in all fields of engineering!

[@barnesnplebian6462]

In my experience, senior swe are the ones I go to ask for help with a bug, then when they come and look at the code with me, the bug mysteriously disappears and everything works fine.

[@xuedi]

In German tech startups i made the experience Senior bring a bit more abstract expectations like knowing and living patterns a bit more and the responsibility to teach juniors and transfer knowledge... I don't see the impact point, i have seen juniors putting their wight in and hat bigger impact than most seniors, but a senior might help the junior to sketch out the project at the beginning ...

[@japanified]

It means you are good enough that your every step isn't dragging the rest of the team down.

[@sombraSoft]

it's funny how your poll is accurate to uncle bob's projection of new programmers entering the market. he says that every 5 years or so the population of software people in general double, so at all times half the population of programmers has got 5 years or less experience.

[@pheezus]

The senior devs where I work (fortune 500) are mostly all manager-lite types, they don't actually code they supervise, help plan, and delegate the work out. On my team its a few of us junior devs that do most of the coding work, although sometimes I do get to review pull requests and teach others. So honestly, the title junior dev doesnt really mean much, the level of expertise at the bottom level varies so much between everybody

[@coder4life]

this sounds like a very rare case

[@astarfullofskies8735]

I'll share my 5 cents, i might mix it with personal opinions, but let's try anyway. Senior is a word to describe someone who became effective within the role, a senior is the inhabitant of a well defined niche within the enterprise context, that niche might aswell be fluid and it should be as much as possible. If seniority marries immobility, and juniority deos not, then, you might become intrested in your own "reset button", just because growth as a software developer is more about individual and group trajectories, and it's not a matter of setting grades. Our work is about architecture design, problem solving, coherency, armony, iterative reasoning, self control, empathy, diplomacy, logical thinking, critical thinking, testing, creativity: behind the concept of writing code there's a mental world, a science, an art and a garden, and your growth stops only when you set the bar.

[@razvanradoi2139]

Wow wait you built the Patreon app on your own? Wow, that's impressive. Usually with big tech companies you always expect there are a lot of people contributing to a project, it's so cool and crazy when you find out it's just 1-2 people

[@Junnybop]

Mayuko is so legit!

[@PoolarityChannel]

Senior engineers typically can start anything from scratch and take on anything from scratch, any code base with nearly zero help. But that's only "should" be able to, in many places that is generally not the case. Sometimes senior is simply the person has been there for a long time and its really Seniority and Tenure and has nothing to do with skillset. However "Senior" is also not purely technical skillset, it can also simply mean that this particular "Senior" engineer just so happens to understand particular aspects of the "business domain" and can apply it in some form to the code, but not necessarily be even as good a "Developer" or "Engineer" as a normal Software Engineer. In some places a Senior Engineer might even be better than the Principal Engineer or Architect, but just don't have the title. Though in general the mark of a good Engineer is not about titles, its about the ability to solve problems with effective solutions. Then the title may simply be about climbing the Career ladder or getting a pay bump in Salary, which is also important. Regardless of what the actual definition of "senior" even means, (I believe its a meaningless term), what is important is to understand that in the context of a Business, you are getting paid for your Work, so you need to have some self awareness of what your Value is to the company, and get paid accordingly.

[@dandogamer]

I think we need to get it out our heads that a senior is someone who doesn't ask for help and you will be looked down on as a junior if you do. Software engineering is a social job and involves talking to lots of different people i.e project managers, designers, data team and other software engineers. A bad senior is one who thinks they know exactly how to implement a feature without opening up a discussion to decide on the best way to solve that task. Even if you are 99% sure on the way you would implement it there might be a better way or you might have overlooked something. Even if you don't it's nice to geek out with someone, make friends, and learn new ways of working. I've seen bad seniors try to micromanage other devs just to prove they are senior (and hitting their personal performance goals) as well as hoarding business knowledge and upcoming plans to make themselves crucial to the company whilst forcing others "beneath" them to ask for this information and thus appear junior.

[@NoKingButChrist]

I can understand the frustration. But the “senior” phenomenon is pretty understandable when you know the business dynamics. 1) When many companies look for someone “senior” it’s basically shorthand for “knows what they’re doing and doesn’t need a ton of help.” OR it’s because they need expedited capability on an existing or potential project. Consulting companies need capable people to take over bigger opportunities and newer engineers won’t suffice. 2) The concert of training senior engineers can be admirable, sure, but there is active disincentive to focus on doing that for this simple fact: If you are trained to senior level and you leave the company, you get to keep 100% of your experience and training. But the business LOSES 100% of that training and experience.

[@biboiiobib]

What podcast do you listen?? Any suggestions?