While looking for a job recently, I stumbled upon an interesting phenomen that I consider to be a curse for senior software engineers.

Samuel Maudo

Couchbase

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The Curse of the Senior Software Engineer discusses the importance of titles in companies, how they determine pay ranges and allow for progression and evaluation. It also explores the potential curse of staying in the same role for too long and offers two options for avoiding it: playing by the corporate rules or exiting the game completely.

The Curse of the Senior Software Engineer

I’ve been wearing the Senior Software Engineer title for years now. I don’t feel stuck with it. In many companies, I’d be considered a Principal engineer or a CTO, but I stopped caring.
Running my own business, finding clients, and doing the technical things from the ground up, I could have picked any title from sales to management to CTO.
Now, as I transition back to FTE, during interviews, I found that the best approach was to explain my responsibilities and let them decide what role I would play inside their organization.
Btw, these role structures also vary between organizations.

Titles ,esp in large orgs are somewhat important. They not only help in setting clear career paths for employees, encouraging motivation and retention by offering visible goals, but they also streamline the process of evaluating performance against predefined standards.
This clarity benefits both the employees, who gain a sense of direction and accomplishment, and the organization, which can more easily identify and reward contributions, ensuring talent is recognized and nurtured effectively. Wdyt?

Good Post! I have 33+ years of experience and I’m a Dev Team Lead, I’ve been in this role - supervisor/line manager for decades at various employers and at this point I’ve come to the conclusion that whatever people look for to promote… I don’t have it. Could be a style thing or how I think or…? But whatever it is I don’t show it. There is no upward path at my current employer, the only way to grow might be to find another position. Hummm

That’s very interesting. We programmers usually ignore the importance of improving soft skills that may impact our careers deeply.

Some developers would like to only code and are actually interested in keeping their IC position. Leadership positions take you away from full time coding which is not always desired. Something to keep in mind