What does "Senior" Software Engineer mean? (From a Senior Software Engineer)

so like what's the deal with senior software engineers hey everybody my name is miyuko and welcome back to my channel where we talk about tech career and life so thanks to a year-end survey that i did last year as well as me looking at my analytics all the freaking time i know that a lot of y'all are university students studying computer science or similar to get into the tech industry or you're doing a career switch into software engineering or you're an early career software engineer and you're here for fun times and advice and career and stuff like that that means that you'll probably feel something when i say the term seeing your software engineer and that's probably because a lot of you have been through the whole like software engineering job search in a while and you see that like most job postings out there for software engineers are prefixed with the word senior to the point where it almost feels like companies are only ever hiring for senior ones and you know what i've had thoughts about this in the past like why don't companies hire more junior engineers like what even is the big deal with seniors why is senior such a loaded term and why do companies want them so badly so when i'm feeling kind of like the like frustrated like oh like i don't get it about something i talk to somebody about it so i talked to my friend sophie who's the ceo at formation.dev about what does it mean what is a senior software engineer her company is actually the sponsor of today's video so thank you to information for sponsoring stick around to the end to learn about how they take junior and mid-level engineers to land jobs at fan companies so let's define it what does senior software engineer really mean to me like the one word that i would really associate with seniority is ultimately impact like how much impact are you having as as an engineer right so you start off in your career you're working on like little tasks right like very isolated pieces of code that you're you're shipping and over time you're increasing your impact both in terms of scope of the the feature or the product and impact on the team i think seniority comes in so many different shapes and forms so i actually encourage people not to think so binary when it comes to you know i'm either a senior software engineer or not like there's so many different levels above and there's so many ways that you can be senior this totally checks out with my experience of being a senior software engineer because yes i am a senior software engineer as soon as i got the promotion or like the role of senior software engineer uh even maybe even like a couple months before that because i had to be promoted into the role which means i had to already be doing this i just was trusted with a lot more surface area in the code base in fact my very first senior software engineer role was at patreon where literally i was the only ios developer at the company and so i owned the entire ios code base which is a lot so yes i definitely had a lot of impact in the work that i was doing because i was literally the only one doing it don't worry we did hire other ios engineers afterwards it was just like a short year where like i was the only one and it was kind of hard but help me grow but even with this whole definition of what a senior software engineer was i still feel like i have this like frustration towards like this whole senior thing to the point it just felt like it was kind of almost like a gatekeeping mechanism sort of especially because i heard of like so many great and incredible efforts all across the industry to invite people from underrepresented backgrounds into tech like all these efforts to invite women into tech or veterans into tech or just like how computer science programs at universities are so incredibly impacted and full that it's like busting at the seams but let me tell you when i was like senior software engineer i was like cool where are they where like i don't i don't see any of them like i don't get to work with junior engineers so like where where are all these people i just thought maybe senior software engineer was just like a really elusive term that prevented people from like climbing the ranks in tech or something like that like i think it was that whole like oh in order to get this job as a junior engineer you had to already have two to three years of experience kind of crap so i just thought something similar to that was happening with the whole senior software engineer situation i do think that the title senior software engineer is somewhat misused in a lot of like smaller companies in particular especially ones that don't come from the traditional tech industry where they're almost using it as a word to like attract people because they're like oh call you a senior engineer you know at least from you know at facebook and at next door where i worked like each of the different quite granular levels again meant something in particular that is specific to your responsibilities and a pretty well-defined scope of work and i think internally it is much more clear with a lot of interns and with a lot of super junior engineers who are just graduating from boot camps the expectation to be honest for someone that junior is that they're net zero in terms of like effort to train them and like how much output they're gonna get engineering is one of those things you're not typing a whole lot throughout the day like you're only writing like tens of lines of code maybe and so it's all in the thinking right and so if you're at a point where you don't know what to do and you need someone to think through it and help you figure out the solution then you know it would be faster typically for that person to just do it and rather than explain it to you and the only work that you're able to save is like maybe the like the the minor amount needed to like type up the solution and send out a change or something like that so when you're really really junior when when when a company is hiring you and you know i i see this with some of our junior hires too is that i'm investing in this person right i believe that this trajectory of this person is so high that in a year when they're very net positive i want them to already be on our team really i think when some companies say senior what that signals to me is that they don't have the capacity right now to have a net zero or oftentimes even net slightly negative because it takes more effort to train them than the output this is where you really have to remember that like companies at the end of the day are businesses so they operate by using their resources wisely in order to generate revenue and at a typical tech company employees like people are by far their like biggest most expensive resource so every hiring decision has a lot to do with what does the company get out of it versus what does the person get out of it and making sure it makes sense and it took me a long time to like really internalize this because i fought this for a long time but literally some companies just don't have the time or money or bandwidth in order to train junior engineers to become senior ones that's typically why you don't find junior roles at startups because they're literally just hauling ass trying to like make product i think a lot of the impact that seniority levels within a huge company relates to the number of engineers that you your work has an impact on right so when you ship a small feature like you're only impacting like your immediate team right and over time you're growing in scale in terms of the amount of impact to you know now your code is impacting tens of engineers hundreds of engineers thousands of engineers the whole company right i think that it's possible that at smaller companies it's actually very hard to have those different tiers where it's like you know there's not like those more different levels of scale because within at least the facebook hierarchy there's at least like six or seven pretty distinct categories that i can think of that each of them means something quite different in terms of like your your scale of impact but a lot of the scales of impact actually just don't translate or make much sense in a smaller company setting this is just how companies work so in order to be employed by them you kind of just got to keep this value exchange in mind so since a lot of companies don't have the time and resources in order to train juniors to become seniors there are things that you can do in order to fill your own skill gaps things like becoming proficient in your technology or your programming language or working on your problem solving skills i think becoming proficient in project management is also a part of this too and really just learning how to be resourceful on your own so learning how to figure out problems without much guidance without much hand-holding i think is one big differentiating factor between junior engineers and senior ones and it's a learned skill so all that said like when do you know when you're a senior software engineer like how do you know that you can like apply to those roles or like maybe even put that title in your linkedin i think to me the answer is when you own some small area of the product and you are the go-to person for something in the company at the facebook level like a small area of the the product might be something like you know the bookmarks at that on the home page like if you own that whole area and if anyone in the company's like there's a bug in this this area um like you're the go-to person then then you're probably a senior engineer so there is kind of a sense like someone has to call you a senior software engineer before you can call yourself one i think it's like a you'll know when you know kind of thing which is like again frustrating i know but it does kind of just happen i guess because the really important part is that in order to be called this i think your performance and your impact have to be objectively evaluated which it's really hard to objectively evaluate your own stuff so that's a low down on senior software engineers am i still a little frustrated about the whole thing yes of course do i wish there were more companies that actually hired junior engineers and trained them to become senior engineers because it would be an investment toward their future and the industry's future of course but this is what we're working with and i think it's important to know what's going on in order to like know how to like become a senior software engineer basically in one really really great way in order to level up your skills to become that senior software engineer is to check out the formation fellowship information is the sponsor of today's video and they have a really unique program that's helped engineers to land jobs at companies like facebook and google and lyft and twitch and airbnb so thank you so much to sophie for being in today's video and sharing her insight she's the ceo of formation actually and she knows a lot about the whole software engineering interview process and how to level up information was founded by staff level engineers like sophie and others from companies like facebook and nextdoor who conducted thousands of software engineering interviews and wanted to help prepare software engineers to perform at a fan level bar for those interviews you can apply to their fellowship through their website formation.dev if you identify as someone who is an engineer with one to four years of experience who are focused on front end backend or full stack and need help training for technical interviews once you get accepted into the program you get a training plan that's personalized to your specific skill gaps with direct mentorship from super senior engineers and referrals directly into the top companies in the industry the fellowship usually lasts between three to six months and once accepted they support you unconditionally until you land your dream role of course you can do this part-time if you're currently working they also offer income sharing as an option so if you want you can pay nothing until you get a job i mean you all know interview prep and like technical interview studying and stuff can be so just mind draining and stuff like that and so having a program like this that's structured with advice from people who are really experienced within the industry can really improve your odds of landing your dream job you can apply for free on their website at formation.dev which is linked also in the description box and whether or not you get in you'll get some invaluable career advice from an engineering mentor and a free prep guide that's a really helpful resource to prepare you for fan level interviews thank you so much information for sponsoring thank you sophie for being in the video and thank you for watching don't forget to subscribe and let me know what you thought in the comments down below i'll see you next time bye [Music]

Channel: mayuko

Views: 205,856

Keywords: mayuko inoue, hellomayuko, senior software engineer

Id: ys7V9JSTE5A

Length: 12min 44sec (764 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 16 2021