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Comment by chrisBob | Hacker News Reader

> Senior Engineer: Typically 5+ years of experience. Typically less than 30% of employees in a company are at this level.

Where do old programmers go? Are these numbers related to companies that are constantly growing? I expect to be working for another 20 years, so I don't understand how 70% could be at less than 5 years.

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First off, it's ridiculous to me that our industry calls five years of experience "senior." In what other industry is a twenty-something with a handful of years of experience, barely out of college, a senior? I've been at this for only a decade and I bristle at being called senior. In my opinion it's pure ego-stroking.

Secondly, old programmers become managers and consultants. Programming is a young man's game, seemingly by design. We invented a hiring process that's roughly equivalent to fraternity hazing, that only younger folks are willy to out up with. We weed out the olds by only seeking out coders who are "passionate" (have no other real world responsibilities) and that are more easily cowed by "Agile" and "Scrum" to become line workers in a feature factory. But the older they get, the less willing they are to out up with the bullshit. I, for one, realized that I wanted to find solutions to tough problems instead of bang out features that no one but the project manager asked for. And as a programmer, you have surprisingly little say over how problems get solved, unless you go into consulting. That's probably where you and I will end up.

I believe, because our industry skews so young and inexperienced, that is why continually get caught in hype cycles. Some kid comes along and "invents" some new technology that's actually been around forever, they're just too young to remember. If there were more adults in the room where happens, maybe the kids would stop getting excited over recycled tech.

But now I'm veering into oldman-yells-at-cloud.jpg territory, so I should probably stop here.

It says 'seniors typically have 5+ years of experience'. It doesn't say 'people with 5+ years of experience are typically seniors', which is how I think you read it?

> don't understand how 70% could be at less than 5 years.

70% are below that level not 70% are below 5 years.

One doesn't automatically get into that level as soon as they reach 5 yrs of experience.

Honestly, while we can debate what “Senior” should mean, what it has come to mean in the higher paying parts of the industry is that you’ve gotten one promotion. Most companies you _will_ get promoted if you stay there 5 years, even places like Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc. If you haven’t been, you have a serious performance problem and they probably wish they hadn’t hired you in the first place.

There are plenty of people in all kinds of companies who go year after year of very high performance, but who do not get promoted. Companies love these employees, because they get consistent high performance but don't have to pay them at the higher level. The ones who are good at interviewing leave after a while, which is how the industry gets the reputation for job hopping.

Keep in mind that these top paying companies are all rapidly growing. That's also why the median tenure at some of these places is unusually low, even when they have good employee retention.

retired would be my guess if i see these huge salaries

Almost none of these companies existed 20 years ago.

How much will change in the next 20 years?

Levels.fyi is probably at the mercy of who gives them data, and it’s easy to tell that they get much more data provided the more junior the role. One conclusion you could draw is that there are simply way fewer roles at that level, but another you could draw is that people become less likely to share their info as they gain seniority/compensation. Or it could be that culturally people born in the late 90’s share “private” information more readily than those born earlier.

I’m not sure what the truth is, since I do not have data on the distribution of levels for the whole industry, but I suspect there’s a combination of things going on, one of which _is_ that the industry is growing rapidly. However, I don’t believe it has grown so fast that you can say 70% of employees have less than 5 years tenure in the industry. This doesn’t pass the sniff test (just look around you right now).

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