What does it mean to be a SENIOR engineer?

A simple question to determine seniority.

Hi! I’m Rahul, a software engineer with a passion for teaching. I went to Stanford, was a founding engineer at a startup, and have worked at various companies across Silicon Valley. I’m currently an Android Developer at Facebook and teach an Android class at Stanford. Would love to connect with you! This channel is about tech (especially Silicon Valley), combining tactical how-to guides with interviews.

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[xskrish]

One more factor that can be considered is how quickly he/she is able to get to the root cause of an issue and figure out an approach to resolve it. When I was junior anything unfamiliar would just halt my progress completely, now I'm kinda mid level and I can usually figure things out on my own but every senior engineer/engg. leader I've worked with is very very quick to figure out where a problem lies and what the approach should be to fix an issue. They obviously shouldn't be expected to have the time to sit and code the solution but they're always the guy everyone in the team reaches out to in case they're stuck.

[NimTheHuman]

This is a very interesting way to think about seniority.
We're oversimplifying a bit but it's definitely on the right track — judging based on one's abilities rather than years of industry experience.
Thanks for sharing. :) Insightful as always, Rahul!

[boom_shankar]

Excellent. It's not about how many years of experience one has. More about how much cognitive load one can handle and conduct interactions with many stakeholders at once.

[daruiraikage]

Haha, all this while I stressed myself out with self doubt thinking I was not good enough as I would not be able to implement full fledged features and architecture them whenever I start with an entry level role. Turns out, entry level devs just do bug fixes? I can handle bug fixes and a week is sufficiently reasonable for fixing a bug. Am I interpreting your clip accurately? I ask because they always seem to ask for so much in job descriptions, its like they want us to start building complete apps/features from day 1.

[Warron]

Good tip, but unapplicable to the likes of me, who are the only mobile dev in their company and therefore has to plan everything by themselves from scratch to release and till the end of a product lifecycle 😅 Kinda hard to assess your skill level when you don't know where do you stand up against others

[RatherBeCancelledThanHandled]

A true senior engineer is trained in the ways of shaolin and understands the the mitochondria is the power house of the cell.

He understands that like heman there can only be one .

He understands the hierarchy of burger flavours . Bison < chicken < beef.

I’ve never in my life meant a senior engineer who doesn’t meet the above criteria.

I’ve been coding for 90 years

[ilyesmilyesm]

so a freelancer is kinda doing a senior engineer job, that's why it's harder than just working in a company

[velichamislamic]

I think I'm mid-senior level, haha