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Comment by gregjor | Hacker News Reader

Answered about 100 times already but I’ll answer again. Senior software engineer doesn’t refer to something you are or a quality inherent to you. It refers to the degree of competence, leadership, and experience you bring to a project and team. If you plan to leave academia remember to leave behind the academic obsession with titles and credentials.

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Leadership is something you are, you can learn tricks to improve it and train yourself to be better but at the end of the day not everybody is born a leader.

Being senior is also about breadth and not just depth, and this is something else that not everyone posses.

Having left academia (well, industrial research) for industry, I find industry is way more obsessed with titles and credentials than academia seemed to be. But that probably has to do with increased politics in the latter compared to the former.

Perhaps it depends on the field. The software business has no standardized titles or career progression. Many companies inflate titles or let programmers choose their own. You “become” senior when your colleagues acknowledge you as such.

We can choose our own title at my current workplace, but you are expected to know who the tech leads are even if they aren’t officially communicated information (I’m sure the managers have a list somewhere, but I have trouble figuring it out sometimes).

In research, I’d work with people who were super senior managers and…I’d never know and it wouldn’t matter.

I actually want to be technically senior without politics and bureaucracy. Technically capable like GeoHotz, Dean, Caramack, RMS, etc. The management part of the role can come later!

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