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> Of course, those aren't hard rules, senior with 6 years is ok too, but let's dont be ridiculous with seniors BELOW 3 years.

I've seen it legitimately happen quite a few times, but these are rare. Examples of the sorts of people it applies to:

  * Taking graduate CS classes at Ivy League universities while in high school
  * Nationally/internationally ranked competitive programmers
  * 4.0 GPAs in tough majors at elite schools without grade inflation
  * Maintainer of parts of the Linux kernel while still in high school

It's not typical, but I've known many dozens of people like this who are legitimate tech leads at very selective companies with 1-3 years of professional employment experience. (edited: formatting)

In my view seniority is about breaking the mold you described above and learning about economics, politics, staffing, real world design constraints etc.

The people above have their tech chops perfected on day 1 of their professional employment.

They get the economics, politics, staffing, real world design constraints polished while most juniors are learning about algorithms, design, and unit testing.

> tech chops perfected on day 1

I don't really understand what you're getting at with your comment but this claim is nonsense.

Sure, but I've excluded such people

>I'm not talking about highly skilled/talented people

S.I.T.O. = Senior in Title Only.

This applies to me. I'm ~9 years into my career, 5 in my current specialty. I'm titled as a senior developer, mainly because I am the only developer for my product at the company (I maintain our warehouse management system).

Honestly, it sucks, because I do not have senior levels of industry experience but am still required to make decisions as if I did. I don't like the situation, but I make the best of it and try to source second opinions from those wiser than myself, which usually means contacts outside my current employer.

I'm not sure how common my situation is, but I'm sure I'm not the only one to title creep more rapidly than is perhaps sane.

I think this is a lot more common than one might think. The trend of hiring "Only Seniors" puts a downwards pressure on both engineers and those managing them to focus on titles over pay increases. The engineer gets the title thinking they can leverage it for more pay at a different position, but in reality they end up trapped at their current employer because they are from then on interviewed as a senior level engineer and unable to pass merit by that benchmark. Should they aim for a non senior role, they automatically face negative hiring bias because the hirer assumes (probably accurately) that they will demand more pay for the same role compared to non-senior applicants with the same years of experience.

Strange catch 22 situation where the title promotion actually locks them in where they are for at least another few years.

> 0-3 junior, 3-7 mid, 7+ senior

What do people use outside of software dev for these kind of titles? Because to me even 7 years for "senior" seems very fast. I don't think people outside of software dev progress up the ladder that fast?

So… I’ve been writing software professionally since 2002 and was programming for fun/some open source for about 10 years prior to that. I’m still an IC, by choice (and spend a fair bit of time mentoring/doing architecture, but also writing code and laying out circuit boards). If we’re going to do job titles in increments of 3-4 years, I’m going to have the most ridiculous titles soon because all of the usual ones will have come and gone.

But all of that is just to say that I don’t think years of experience is a good metric at all for job titles. By far the best metric I’ve come across over the years is “how long can you trust this person to work on something without worrying that we’re going to have to throw away a significant chunk of their work?”

Junior developers? Maybe a day or two before they might need a course correction or feedback. Mid, maybe a week, tops. Senior, maybe two weeks. Staff/principal (depending on how you even order those in seniority) can be longer although they still need to check in with the business/peers on a regular basis just to verify that we’re all going in the same useful direction.

In investment banking, for one example:

0-3 analyst 3-7 Associate (mid) to Vice President (senior to staff/manager) 7+ if they're good, Managing Director (staff to senior staff/manager to senior manager)

“They”/“Their” is a 100% accepted and easier to read alternative to writing “he/she” all the time.