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

🔖c h a p t e r s 🔖
00:00 - Intro
01:35 - What does Senior SWE mean?
03:12 - Is the title misleading?
06:27- How company resources impact the title
08:20 - Things you can work on
08:55 - How/When do you know when you're a Senior SWE?
10:10 - Resources to help you
12:28 - Outro

💖 m o r e m a y u k o 💖

🛠m y g e a r 🛠 (affiliate)

🌱r e s o u r c e s🌱

🎧m u s i c 🎧

🌸a b o u t 🌸
Mayuko Inoue is a content creator and Software Engineer. After working in Silicon Valley tech companies like Intuit, Patreon, and Netflix for six years as an iOS Engineer, she became a full-time creator in 2020. Her work aims to help people find their way through the tech industry by sharing her own experiences navigating this world through technology, career advice, and lifestyle videos. She is passionate about discussions around mental health, cultural identity, and creating technology with empathy and compassion.

✉️c o n t a c t ✉️

This video was sponsored by Formation.

[alankwanHI]

I’ll share my experiences as hiring manager.

While the monikers like junior/senior aren’t very well defined in general, it is almost universally used to indicate someone who no longer needs instructions from the supervisor. Once they are informed of the what, a senior can design, plan, assign resources, oversee the development processes, all the way to completion.

Please note that a senior is not just a good engineer. The work above encapsulates various peripheral aspects of software development: architecture, design patterns, resource management, training, supervision, source code management, release management, issue & problem management, testing, QA, coordination with other teams (operations, networking, security, etc.). A senior engineer is someone on track to leave the engineering field (if that’s what s/he wants) to either management or architecture.

When I train my seniors, I no longer train them on engineering matters. My expectation is that they know all that. I train them on all the peripherals skills above, both hard skills and soft skills. I know a senior is a senior when s/he start to minimize the work of a supervisor so the super can spent time dealing with their peers and bosses. The more issue a worker generate for the super, the less senior-looking the worker is.

In a well defined job family environment, all the seniors are defined in similar manner: 1) They are completely skilled in their own craft, 2) they can lead their own team and coordinate with all other teams, 3) all they need from the super are resources and conflict management/resolution.

[sotirikolvani]

The title "Senior" has been confusing & frustrating for many people including myself. Senior software engineers are experienced employees who would usually take the lead in projects related to software development. Every company, has their own definition of Seniority which means that someone can be called a Senior faster in some companies than others depending on the developer's experience level and the company's view. For example, in my case, as a Junior I would work mostly around fixing bugs, ghosting a senior experienced engineer & pair programming and work on small tasks. As a mid level I would have a bit more ownership into the projects and I would provide more results and complete more tasks for the team. Now, as a Senior I own part of the projects as Sophie mentioned which makes me focus more on the technical structure, architecture, design patterns, and reviewing code for the team to produce as clean & efficient code as possible. Think of it like life, the more we grow up, the more seniors we become which means that we automatically get more responsibilities as adults as we have to take care of our own life and things become harder and more challenging every day, but at the same time, we become more experienced.

[rhkilis]

Sophie's point about impact being the differentiator between a senior and a non-senior is correct from my own experience. I'm more of a system administrator rather than a software engineer, but the moment I was promoted to senior, there was more expectation that I should be contributing a lot more in helping define team priorities and roadmaps. There was more reliance on me to ideate solutions rather than build them because I was expected to understand best practices and to know the pros and cons of building one solution versus the other. My direct manager is coming to me for answers, rather than telling me the answers.

[lostman]

I've been a senior software engineer for about 15 years and an System Architect for about 5. At first, i felt like these titles, just reflected how many years i've been in the business. After observing others, I started noticing that "years-in-the-business" had little to do with impact-fulness. in other words, some younger SWE were killing it, and quickly became leads, while more experienced SWE were not capable nor interested in becoming a leads.  

I've done a lot of hiring over the years and here is what i look for:
1. Basic experience in software development.  Working in teams...etc
2. A good familiarity of most things software.
3. The humbleness to know that you don't know everything, but the confidence to know that you can figure anything out.

[IxionwinG]

Incredibly timely video, Mayuko! You dropped this literally right when I was strugglebussing to get into a senior role, and now that I’m about to actually hop into it at another company, I’m really sweating about it. Thanks for presenting these perspectives — the concept of seniority really does get frustratingly vague, so any insight at all helps!

[JonathanYeong]

Love this breakdown of what a senior engineer is. There’s roadmaps and resources for people beginning as developers, but as you get further on in your career things become much more fuzzy. Tying everything to impact makes a lot of sense!

[scarpa]

This was a really good discussion of what "Senior" means, I myself became a "Senior Engineer" at a startup in lieu of an actual pay increase. "Startup titles" we used to call them. It took me many years to internalize that maybe I *was* a Senior engineer!

I wanted to add a bit of insight and advice specifically related to my perspective on interviewing candidates for both Junior (yes we do hire them!) and Senior roles. In simplest terms, we expect Senior people to already know what we want them to and to join our company ready to work immediately, with maybe a short ramp-up to learn company specific practices.

As for Junior hires Sophie put it best, we don't expect anything more than "net-zero" for quite some time. I personally am mostly looking for motivation, willingness to learn and ability to communicate. My advice here for those seeking Junior or entry level positions is to be very honest with yourself that you *are* inexperienced. I will often ask questions that I know the candidate can't fully answer and that's OK! I see a lot of nervous candidates and fully understand that feeling, but the candidates who are able to honestly say "I don't know that" or better yet explain the limits of their knowledge of a subject stand out. Even if your knowledge is "I read a blog post about it" or "I've heard of it" that's good enough. For me I'm looking for a dialogue and trying to get a sense of how it will be to train and mentor that candidate should I recommend them for hire.

If anyone is still reading, I do wish my company hired more Junior roles. It's an investment and a risk, but in my experience the colleagues I've witnessed go from Junior hires to experienced, solid contributors are the best ones to work with.

[cody_codes_youtube]

Man. The title and the expectations are so different between companies, Indistries, teams. Which also makes it hard to understand from the outside or even when you’re switching jobs. Thanks for sharing this video.

[amanewgirl]

Thank you so much for this video. It's made me realise that I was thrown into a senior dev position in my company with no support, props when I succeeded or mentoring to know what to do now I'm here. Gives me confidence in knowing what I bring to the table as I start to look for jobs elsewhere and what I should be looking for/ to do when I complete the transition

[kayteeflick]

I LOVE your hair!! This style looks fantastic on you!

[PeterElbaum]

Sophie's definition of "impact" is interesting and largely aligns with my experience – at my current job, we say seniors are "force multipliers."

That said, I've found that seniority is largely a function of mindset. I've known people with two years experience that had senior-level impact even if they didn't have the title. And definitely agree that problem solving skills and working independently are a huge part of that.

Love your videos - keep it up! :)

[Anja]

This video really reassured me as a junior and now I have a clearer understanding, thank you so much

[martinmj]

Very timely video! I’m weeks away from launching 2.0 of the app and having recently passed 1 year as a «junior» I’m curious where to position myself if I were to join another company. The sponsor also seemed really interesting! Should consider sending in an application around spring next year.

[cjchang]

As a Senior software engineer/team lead at a large tech company in Silicon Valley:
Great stuff! Yes impact is definitely a key factor to get promoted to senior. For large organizations that can mean exposure at the executive and customer facing level. For me, being the go to person is definitely needed for a good senior, i.e. answer questions and do code reviews of junior/entry team members. A great senior is someone that can lead a team well, i.e. soft skills. Training and mentoring junior team members. A great senior should also be able to identify important problems from the big picture, design a solution from that picture at the code level and direct+help a team to deliver the solution. The soft skills/team element is HUGE for a great senior, just my take :)

[mintri]

It's kinda weird that I've met Sophie before watching this video. She's a badass programmer and an awesome mentor.

[youngsuit]

i watched this today in prep for my senior interview and i appreciate your ability to navigate the system while also criticizing it

[tsuna]

This video was really helpful! And the helpful comments here also came thanks to this video. Thanks alot!

[dartthewarrior]

This is a great video! As someone who is/was a senior at two mega tech / fang level companies, I agree that the senior role sounds nice but really it simply means that you are the go to on something / are a SME in 1 or multiple areas.

[sahilaujla]

I didn't know about FORMATION. Thank you for this amazing opportunity. I will apply when I feel I am prepared.

[saintnight]

based on my observations and experiences, being a "Senior Engr. / Dev" is someone who can mentor and importantly keep business in mind, Junior Engr. / Dev clings more on the technical side, they keep on asking the "whats" and "hows", while Seniors are more like on the "why" side