alt Hacker NewsIMO tech suffers pretty horrible title inflation. If you reach "senior" after only two years and "principle" after 5, what is left for the next 20 years? It's pretty ridiculous. But this sort of thing is really typical. The average tenure of someone in tech is probably about 2 years and each year the expectation is to see "big" career progression. Very often "When is my title going to change" is asked literally in the first year performance review.
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> IMO tech suffers pretty horrible title inflation
It began with "software engineer"
I've had calls with Principal Architects who couldn't code themselves out of a wet paper bag.
And according to the company experience chart, they should've been a "thought leader" and "able to instruct senior engineers"
My title? Backend Programmer (20 years of experience). Our unit didn't care about titles because there was a "budget" for title upgrades per business unit and guess which team grabbed all of them =)
The important thing here is for people to understand that at best titles only indicate relative rank within a company. And even then that's tenuous. Titles are effectively meaningless when comparing outside of a company.
> If you reach "senior" after only two years and "principle" after 5, what is left for the next 20 years?
There is nothing left. Not everyone puts in the same dedication towards the craft, of course. It very well might take someone 30 years to reach "principle" (and maybe even never). But 5 years to have "seen it all" is more than reasonable for someone who has a keen interest in what they are doing. It is not like a job dependent on the season, where you only get one each year. In computing, you can see many different scenarios play out in milliseconds. It doesn't need years to go from no experience to having "seen it all".
That is why many in this industry seek management roles as a next step. It opens a new place to find scenarios one has never seen before; to get the start the process all over again.
What makes this whole thing worse is the concept of "non-terminal" levels, i.e. levels that you're not allowed to stay at indefinitely, which means that you must either get promoted or fired.
I can understand not wanting to let people stay in a junior position forever, but I've seen this taken to a ridiculous extreme, where the ladder starts at a junior level, then goes through intermediate and senior to settle on staff engineer as the first "terminal" position.
Someone should explain to the people who dream up these policies that the Peter Principle is not something we should aim for.
It's even worse when you combine this with age. I'm nearing 47 years old now and have 26 years of professional experience, and I'm not just tired, but exhausted by the relentless push to make me go higher up on the ladder. Let me settle down where I'm at my most competent and let me build shit instead of going to interminable meetings to figure out what we want to build and who should be responsible for it. I'm old enough to remember the time when managers were at least expected to be more useful in that regard.