I think the title has seen some inflation in the past years.
When talking with my oldest collogues, those that started out in the 70s, "Senior Engineer" was apparently reserved for, well, very senior engineers. People could have worked 10-15 years, before getting promoted to that.
These days, it's almost something which happens automatically after 5 years. I've even seen people get angry and frustrated if they haven't gotten that promotion after as little as 2 or 3 years.
But to their defense, A LOT of companies just use the various titles to place them in the correct salary bracket. I've seen examples of hiring more junior people than the title would indicate, simply because they were good candidates / seemed to have potential. And then they were stuck without salary promotions for 2-3 years, as their work output didn't necessarily warrant any higher salary.
Lots of weirdness in this industry, compared to the others I've worked in.
To be fair, in the 70s it was much harder to be productive as an engineer. You weren't writing javascript, you were writing fotran, or cobol, or assembly code, or C. Everything was much less "standard" than it was today, from processor instruction sets to compilers to system calls to source control, etc. It took A LOT of work to understand all the arcane knowledge and become productive. Nowadays, you can read some books, deploy your code to AWS where it runs with 99.99999999% x-platform consistency. The benchmark of being a senior engineer is not "p85 engineer" its "has demonstrated ability to deliver value at specified scope" and its just takes less time to learn everything you need to do that now. Can a person with 3 years XP be a senior? No, they can be a sophomore (think they know it all but mess everything up), but do you need 15 years experience to be a true senior, no you do not.
I don’t see why there is so much emphasis on years. I have 15 years experience myself but I’ve met people with 5 years that were clearly superior to me at leading large scale engineering efforts.
Skills and experience aren't the same thing. The second amplifies the first. If you aren't good at/don't like leadership then finding less senior people who are better at it is not going to be hard. Fortunately leadership is only one skill among many that are valuable in engineering.
It's because companies got liberal with titles. Probably in part due to how fast pay has increased. It's seen as commonplace now, so people expect this fast progression.
When talking with my oldest collogues, those that started out in the 70s, "Senior Engineer" was apparently reserved for, well, very senior engineers. People could have worked 10-15 years, before getting promoted to that.
These days, it's almost something which happens automatically after 5 years. I've even seen people get angry and frustrated if they haven't gotten that promotion after as little as 2 or 3 years.
But to their defense, A LOT of companies just use the various titles to place them in the correct salary bracket. I've seen examples of hiring more junior people than the title would indicate, simply because they were good candidates / seemed to have potential. And then they were stuck without salary promotions for 2-3 years, as their work output didn't necessarily warrant any higher salary.
Lots of weirdness in this industry, compared to the others I've worked in.