I’ve seen people call themselves “senior” after 3 years on the job, other become CTOs in the same time, and others still have a senior title after 20(!) years in the industry yet have a fuckton of technical experience.
I’ve heard that they are all just titles and opinions from “if you don’t have the technical skill you can’t call yourself a senior”, to “senior and staff are just a feeling, principal is the actual senior” and “staff? above senior? we call that manager”.
What’s your story? Is there a ladder? Do you feel like you belong on it? Where are you on it? Does it make sense? Did you see major bumps in salary? Did titles count at all?
I should start by saying I was a middle manager in a large corporation. This may be a different experience in smaller settings.
I think the transition to manager didn’t live up to expectations for me. I knew I would be committing less code and helping clear roadblocks. What I didn’t expect was the bureaucratic catastrophe that is HR and upper management. Often I wasn’t clearing roadblocks as much as insulating my team from terrible knee jerk reactions from above. In example productivity is down let’s bring everyone into the office post Covid. Productivity was not down for my team but going back was the start of it. My top level performers I struggled to hang on to due to HR in acting strict requirements for promotions. Senior needed 7 years and other random rules. That coupled with some not wanting to come in. I remember the most impactful being losing a 4 yr experience programmer who outperformed every senior I had due to those rules.
There were parts I enjoyed. Helping the juniors grow and the surprises I’d get from that. I learned very quickly that a devs initial skill coming in from college or life transitions was not a good way of judging their maximal. I’d have devs come in that I thought no way they’d be a top performer to a few years later being shocked at how good they were and how they flew past their peers. It made the inevitable loss of them more painful. I knew my shooting stars would see better pay and advancement elsewhere.
I really had no problem with the transition from contributing to relying on others. I missed contributing and was good at it but I knew it wasn’t my role. I knew from past experience a manager didn’t know enough about the day to day code to give fine grained suggestions on how to write code.