Comment by WhyOhWhyQ

5 days ago

When did this "junior/senior" lingo get cool? I don't remember it being used when I was young. Maybe the leet code trend brought on a sort of gamification of the profession, with ranks etc..?

As a 51 year old, I hate when other old people think that “back in my day things were different”

> Evans has held his present position with IBM since 1965. Previously, he had been a vice president of the Fed- eral Systems Division with the man- agement responsibility for developing large computing systems; the culmina- tion of this work was the IBM/System 360. He joined IBM in 1951 as a junior engineer and has held a variety of engineering and management posi- tions within the corporation

Dated 1969

https://bitsavers.org/magazines/Computer_Design/Computer_Des...

Next meme that needs to die: “back in my day, developers did it for the love and not the money”

  • The title has always existed. I meant the obsession about being a "a junior" or "a senior", like gaining an achievement in a video game or something. I just thought every young person was a junior engineer and every old person was as senior engineer.

    • You don’t get to be a senior engineer just because of tenure. It’s not gaming the system to expect a level to be based on the amount of responsibility and not just from getting 1 year of experience 10x.

      You want a promotion because you want more money. Even though I have found the difference to not be that great on the enterprise dev side. But in BigTech and adjacent, we are talking about multiple six figures differences as you move up.

      I work in consulting and our bill rate is based on our title/level of responsibility. It kills me that some non customer facing consultants want to have a “career track” that doesn’t involve leading projects and strategy and want to stay completely “hands on”.

      We can hire people cheaply from outside the country that can do that. There is an IC career track that is equal to a director (manager of managers). But you won’t get there hands on keyboard.

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