Ask HN: Can I call myself a senior? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can I call myself a senior?

2 pointsazoth1288 comments

Hey guys,

I would like to know which state i’m currently in. I got my bachelors degree last year. I resigned at the end of June. Due to the setup of the study, i’ve got 2 years of part time and almost 4 years of full-time experience in software development.

In my current job, I do ERP-Desktop-Software development with Delphi and MSSQL-Database. Additionally, I do project management, analyze problems and develop solutions together with the customers, support, etc. (It’s a very small company, so the list goes on.) It’s important to note that my employer is extremely happy with the work I’ve done.

In the new job, I would like to do full-stack development on a modern stack. For example JAM, with a proper backend and something like ReactJS on the frontend. In preparation, I learned my last missing basic (CSS). I’m doing so by building a personal forum with nextjs and postgresql.

My question remains whether I can call myself a senior. Of course, I'm missing a lot of experience in the web-dev field. But on the contrary, i learned a lot of the current technologies and how to design and develop software in general already. Like debugging your code, finding errors, etc.

How do I compare to someone who’s done web development for 4-5 years? How important is the actual language when it comes to applying for a job in another field?

Here's a dirty little secret in the industry: titles don't matter. You can call yourself Senior VP of Super Awesome Engineering and nobody can stop you. You can even put it on your resume! In fact, if anyone calls your last company and asks about you, the most they'll usually say is "Yes, they worked here." That's it. Anything else invites liability, so they usually don't respond with anything else.

Since your last job won't contradict you, there's nothing stopping you from calling yourself a senior engineer, if you really want to.

The only thing that truly matters is whether you can convince another company to hire you at that level. You can skip Senior and go straight to Staff or Principal, if you want to -- but nobody will hire you unless you can back it up in an interview and once you land the job.

The real question here is whether you can land a job as a senior given your skill set. Do you think you can?

Since your resume is basically B.A. study + zero real-world experience? It's probably going to be a hard sell. But again, if you can land an interview, you may be able to convince the hiring manager that you're senior-level talent, even without years of experience in "real world" jobs.

My guess is that you should go in as a non-senior Software Engineer, but find a company that is willing to let you level up as fast as you can demonstrate prowess and skill. There are companies out there that will do that.

Good luck!

You can always find a company that will let you call yourself whatever. At some companies they may call you senior and at some companies they may just call you a software developer.

But my guess is that you're asking about this because you're seeing job posts that say "senior developer". In that case I'd say just ignore "senior" and if you feel like you meet 50% (or something) of the important qualifications, apply.

You never know what a company's pipeline looks like. It does you no harm to try.

How does this actually manifest - do you want to unilaterally change your title on your resume? are you going to introduce yourself to people differently? is it just you in front of the mirror calling yourself senior? (if it's that, you can do it now)

What you call yourself doesn't matter too much, it's more about what your company calls you, and even that varies a lot - there's people with less experience than you who have a senior title and people who have been programming for many years who've never been called senior and it's not a big deal to them.

Basically, land a senior position, then you can.

Sometimes it's better not to give yourself a title. Just say Software Engineer, which is fair because you have a degree. Because you've recently graduated, if you call yourself Senior, there's potential for some people to look at your resume and have doubts, which could result in not being interviewed if they have questions about your honesty. You might actually have the capability and skills of a Senior developer and a safe approach might be to just get the interview and pleasantly surprise them by exceeding their expectations.

> My question remains whether I can call myself a senior.

Sure, senior is not a well defined term. It can mean what you think it means.

No. Pay your dues junior.

I wish this sentiment was more common. It's one thing to know how to build something, it's totally different to know how to maintain it and what to do in an emergency.

Calling yourself a senior is subjective, unless you're within a year of graduation, or over 65 years old.

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