The Career Levels in Engineering

everyone's career path can be a little different but the most common career path for startups and big tech companies especially for engineers looks something like this you start off as an engineering intern throughout your time in university as you graduate college you become a junior engineer then after about one or two years of work experience you become an engineer that's the level that i'm at right now and then after a few more years of work experience you can become a senior engineer from then on things start to get a little interesting first you can stay as a senior engineer for a pretty long time it's not because you're not good enough to get promoted but a lot of people would actually prefer this position because at this position you're actually at your technical prime you're really focusing on being technical and designing and building the best possible product that you can you're not managing anyone or planning what the future of the company will look like so taking a step up from your current role as a senior engineer can take up the fun or the joy of being an engineer since you're not doing as much engineering work anymore when you've been a senior engineer for a while you can move between different projects and different teams for example a mechanical engineer might move over to work on cameras pick up that technology and then after a few years move on and work on thermodynamics projects and doing so just helps you become a much more well-rounded engineer after a while of being a senior engineer some people move on and become lead engineers you start taking more responsibilities by leading projects and helping plan where the future of the company is heading but you're not really focused on managing people just yet you can then choose to continue to progress towards a staff or a principal engineer here you're not expected to be very technical but you're expected to be able to lead and influence people a senior or lead engineer will run across one team whereas a staff or a principal engineer will work across multiple teams across the entire company now if you get tired of electrical engineering work you can choose to take the managerial route from your senior engineering position engineering managers typically don't do any designing coding or building anymore instead they manage teams of like 5 to 15 people they spend a lot of their time hiring making sure the team is healthy helping other team members grow and making sure that their team is working on the right things they also spend a lot of time working with other roles in the company like data scientists product managers ux designers etc you can then continue climbing up becoming a senior manager the director where you start to manage multiple teams you basically work your way up then to senior director vp and eventually c suite so that's like ceo cto co etc another common thing that many people do in their engineering career is when they're relatively young maybe like when they're an engineering intern junior engineer or just an engineer they might make the switch to product management the people that do so are ones that don't really enjoy the technical aspect of engineering and would rather spend their time really just communicating and talking to a lot of people basically being super social is a big part of their job from then on they can get promoted to a senior product manager and then eventually become the lead product manager on the team that they're working on one thing you may be wondering though is what's the difference between a product manager and an engineering manager an engineering manager someone that's in charge of people whereas a product manager on the other hand someone that's in charge of a part a product or a feature for example a product manager can be in charge of the instrument panel of a car or maybe the power button on an iphone or even the instagram notifications feature now that you have a better understanding of the engineering career mind map here's what we can apply to the top paying tech companies now they all use different names for each level and each level is a different lens and some companies have more levels than others for example apple uses the term ict which stands for individual contributor in tech ict 2 is a junior engineer ict3 is an engineer and ict 4 is a senior engineer on the other hand google uses the abbreviation l which stands for level a junior engineer would be l3 an engineer would be l4 a senior engineer would be l5 etc facebook or i guess that's now called meta uses similar terminology as google but instead of l3 l4 and l5 they use e3 e4 and e5 where e just stands for engineer and if you're curious about pay at these companies junior engineers or people that just got this job fresh out of college or university and apple can make 167 000 per year junior engineers at google can make 190 000 per year whereas junior engineers at facebook can make 184 000 per year now this may vary slightly based on what engineering discipline you're in what team you're working on your salary negotiation skills or if you have any past internship experience so it's just a general ballpark now that you have an idea of what the seven engineering career levels are and how they relate to one another let's look at each one in a little bit more detail an engineering intern technically requires zero years of work experience their impact on the company is pretty low at this point in their career they support engineering development of parts and can design their own test fixtures for instance this was a test fixture that i designed in my first ever internship back in 2017. as an intern you're starting to become someone of an expert at using your engineering discipline software tools so solidworks or other cad softwares for mechanical engineers or maybe python or c plus plus for software engineers you're also expected to have relevant school project experience finally the ambiguity of this role is pretty low which means that every task you're given should probably be pretty straightforward now a junior engineer is a recent grad and someone that has anywhere between zero to two years of work experience hardware engineers at this level can get some design tasks do a lot of testing for a lot of the parts that they're working with or do some failure analysis whereas software engineers on the other hand can find themselves writing code tests or documentation and they can also find themselves participating in design reviews or coding reviews where they're basically looking at their co-workers work and giving them some constructive criticism at this level you should have a decently strong understanding of your engineering fundamentals so for mechanical engineers there will be material science and manufacturing processes or for software engineers that could mean having a good understanding of data structures and algorithms and being pretty proficient in your coding language of choice at this level again the ambiguity is pretty low which means you're going to spend a lot of time working with the lead engineer or your manager trying to make your tasks pretty sure forward and very clear the next level is an engineer they will have anywhere between one to five years of work experience a hardware engineer at this level can be in charge of designing parts and sub-assemblies whereas a software engineer at this level will be in charge of designing large features but still get some help from a senior engineer the impact you have at this role starts with understanding the product life cycle for the parts features or sub-assemblies that you're in charge of you're responsible for taking a part or a feature from a concept to a working product now the part or feature you're working on isn't necessarily the most important part but it's somewhat important for the overall product the team is working on at this stage you're also going to start to develop deep technical expertise in one area of engineering for example cameras can become your thing or you can become the go-to person for suspension systems at this stage you also start to have a little bit more ambiguity in your role somewhere between low to medium this means that you start to participate in design requirement discussions or instead of being given a very well defined problem you can start working on problems a little bit more complicated and aren't as clear or straightforward at this stage you should also have a decent amount of experience you can look at your co-workers work give them some feedback or constructive criticism based on your expertise now when you're a senior engineer you can have anywhere between three to ten years of work experience you don't just own a part or feature anymore instead you own a system of multiple different parts and features from the work experience you've had so far you should probably have a deep technical understanding of multiple areas of engineering if you're a software engineer at this level you may be working on improving the overall code structure whereas a hardware engineer may be focusing on improving the overall design of a product at this stage you're not just concerned with your own projects anymore you have to look at the bigger picture and see how you can improve the entire product you can find yourself having medium ambiguity in this role that's because you can find yourself being given technical problems and having to figure out the solution to them without much help from anyone else just having to use your own expertise a lead engineer is someone with over six years of work experience you're now leading projects and planning the design requirements for the projects that you're responsible for obviously you're not doing the entire project yourself because you're going to hand off some of these simpler aspects of the project to younger engineers you're so good at a specific aspect of engineering they're really just here to guide people through the technical aspects of a project using your experience the ambiguity of this role is pretty medium so you're going to find yourself working with engineering managers and pms trying to clarify the engineering and product requirements of a project now we move on to the big dogs staff engineers are people that have well over 10 years of work experience they're out here looking for the most important work prioritizing and coming up with a plan of action to get that done they're experts in many technical areas they have very high level ambiguity because they basically work on taking problems that are really vague and confusing and breaking it down and making it clear so younger engineers can handle these problems finally we have the principal engineer which is someone with over 15 years of work experience at this point you're influencing all the engineering teams and you're setting goals for them to achieve you can also find yourself helping them create processes to make their work a lot more efficient you're also up there with the ceo defining the company's direction for the future you definitely don't have time to be cadding coding designing or building anymore because you're too busy finding these big technical problems trying to break them down so younger engineers can solve them more easily and the only reason you're able to do that is because over the 15 years of work experience that you have you've developed an expertise in so many aspects of engineering the ambiguity of this role is very high because it's literally in the job description to take these big complicated problems and break them down and simplify them for younger engineers and also coach them through it as you climb the ladder from engineering and turn to principal engineer you'll obviously be getting a lot more responsibility which means you'll be getting paid more with every level i mentioned so far it's easy to find yourself chasing that next promotion or trying to get to that next level but it's important to realize that this chase never ends and if you're not happy with the current role that you're at then you're gonna find yourself on this hamster wheel going nowhere i'm personally not a big fan of climbing the corporate ladder because to me it feels like a never ending rat race i don't care about getting promoted i just value doing work that i really enjoy and just trying my best to constantly be learning and improving my skills as i do more of it i get better which may lead to more pain more responsibilities in the future but that's not the main goal that i have in mind so whenever i find myself unhappy of where i'm at now and thinking i'll be a lot happier when i get that raise or that promotion i remember one thing my great-grandfather i honestly know nothing about him how he lived his life what he looked like or even where he's buried it makes you realize that no one in this world will remember you once you're gone not even your own family so getting that promotion is so insignificant in the larger scheme of things and all we really have in this world is our happiness damn i did not mean to get so philosophical uh anyways i hope you enjoyed this video if you did check out this video where i share with you what i do on a day-to-day basis as a mechanical design engineer or check out that video where i share with you my experience working as a tesla engineer anyways i'll see you in the next one peace

Channel: Tamer Shaheen

Views: 58,840

Keywords: mechanical engineer, hardware engineer, software engineer, junior vs senior

Id: 5QSrZpyL0ks

Length: 10min 53sec (653 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 08 2022