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Comment by JohnnyConatus | Hacker News Reader

I agree with everything you said except for one thing: developer salaries later-on are not artificially kept down vs the value they create. The are artificially inflated when they are younger due to the scarcity of developers. This is why one can become a "Senior Developer" at 24 (such as I did) because the title is matched to the salary as opposed to the actual amount of experience it would take to be a "senior" anything in any other field.

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Is there an official definition chart for terms like junior, mid, senior? I keep hearing people sneer at the presumed miss-use of those terms as if everyone knew the official definitions. Last place I worked, senior was just the dev who's been there the longest.

I have asked this to, and often get told senior is "5+ years" with a specific tech stack, junior is usually specifically aimed at people with no/little experience in a dev role, and mid is anything in between. Not sure how well that generalizes to other geographic areas though.

These terms are often defined in terms of autonomy and scope: if you can look around and see what needs to be done, break it down into workable sub-units, wrangle resources somehow (big projects tend to need more than one person working on them), and get it done, that can mean that you're "senior".

I see people on various forums (fora?) asking what number of years of experience makes someone "senior". The most common answer I see is 5. It reminds me of this https://i.imgur.com/7sws9p8.jpg

'senior' is also purposefully being used to make a position more desirable, by sounding better. People like showing off and tend to agree to a lower salary that way.

> Is there an official definition chart for terms like junior, mid, senior?

No. Every company has different definitions and different positions have different meanings. Then there is lead manager, product manager, team lead, etc.

Not only that, I've noticed the position titles are different depending on the company. A junior developer in one HR department might be Programmer Analyst in another HR department.

But generally for me, anyone with 1-4 years is junior, 5-9 is mid and 10+ is senior. But that's just my arbitrary definition.

Question: how does one become a "senior developer" if one has only worked at startups? Is it as simple as assigning yourself the title? Or does one need to work at a large organization (with large teams) to be able to use this title (with credibility of course)? What if you were the only developer at the startup?

The title will be handed out as a perk when you've been with the company for a relatively long period (on the order of a couple years), or to add and ego bump to the salary bump of an offer at a new gig.

In our field, it's a near meaningless title modifier.

I've actually seen titles being used in very different way, as a form of currency. You can offer people a lower salary for which in return they get a big inflated title to stick on their Linkedin profile. Loads of people love big titles to prance around with (especially the younger ones).

I wonder if it ever occurs to these people that I can still see (on linkedin) that you're a "senior javascript engineer" who just graduated from college 2 years ago. 2 years ago you really were a 'senior', but now it's just title inflation?

I also wonder if these same people assume everyone else with "senior" in their title has as little experience as they do.

You can be a "Senior Developer" at 24 because at most places that is a low-mid level position.

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