hello all,I am going to apply a new retail job senior sales assistant, I have been work for a Junior sale in my last company for 2 years, I must really to interview the senior title, it must be a important question. If you a HR, what’s the best answer of different of senior and junior. Please share your experiences.

I notice a lot of posts on this sub revolve around becoming senior, expectations and experience around being senior, change in x, y or z when transitioning to senior or above. While the prospect of advancement and self improvement is a constant discipline and are always worthy goals I think folks seem to put this title or career path on a pedestal.

I think it’s important to call out that the term is highly unregulated and almost meaningless these days. Unilateral it means more years of experience and assumed competency of technical, operational, and business skill. However with the pass 4-6 years of title inflation renders the title truly meaningless. Unless you’re chasing a salary increase nothing really changes once you cross the finish line of becoming senior. Not once since becoming a staff level engineer has it ever come up in conversation amongst peers or management. Your skills often speak for themselves and folks will seek out those who’s talent shines through via operation excellence rather than their title.

It seems like every company kind of has a different idea of the “levels” in web dev.

I’m at my first web dev job, about 1.5yrs experience. Am I still considered junior? Mid yet?

It seems a bit arbitrary.

Does yoe really matter if you perform at a senior level? For example, let’s say you have 2 yoe and you are architecting an entire project end to end and leading a team of developers at a startup vs someone with 5 yoe at a big company and they just do basic ticket work assigned to them. Would someone like a 2 yoe be considered a senior engineer given the work they do is senior level ?

Let’s say your job title is senior web designer, or senior project manager, or senior marketing coordinator or pretty much with the word “senior” in it. Do you mention it when someone asks you what you do? Why or why not?

Edit: Let’s the context is on a date or a dating app when they ask you what you do.

So I've been a dev for about 6 years now. Started as a junior, got bumped to senior after 2.5 years which felt pretty reasonable. Then last year my company did one of those big reorgs and overnight I became a "Staff Engineer." Cool I guess? But literally nothing changed about what I do day to day. Same team, same work.

The thing that's been bugging me is looking at what people call themselves at other companies. A guy I went through bootcamp with is now a "Principal Architect" at a startup with maybe 15 people. I know someone who got hired as VP of Engineering and he manages like 2 people. And LinkedIn is full of people with "Head of" or "Director of" titles who've been working for 3 years total.

I'm not trying to gatekeep or anything. But it kinda feels like titles are just becoming meaningless. Like companies realized it's way cheaper to promote someone's title than to actually give them more money.

Is this a tech thing specifically or does this happen in other industries too? Because when I talk to my friends outside tech they still seem to have pretty normal title progressions

What is preferred to put as position title on a resume or on linked-in? E.g. Senior Engineer or Lead Engineer.

Updating my resume to apply for Senior/Lead/Management level positions and have been in lead roles for about 4 years- officially moved into a position of a Senior role (company’s nomenclature) where I’m still effectively the team lead and my duties haven’t changed.

Hi everyone,

I am a 20+ year veteran in my career field (computer engineering), with multiple skill sets under my belt. There's also some A List companies on my resume. At the risk of sounding prideful, I feel I am a better-than-average candidate when it comes to job-hunting.

I'm currently in the process of interviewing with a respectable company, and the process is going very well; I'm due to have final interviews later this week. But I was thrown for a loop when I learned that this company is considering me for the position of "Associate" Engineer.

To me, an "associate" is an assistant to a more senior member of the company. Or "associate" denotes a junior member of a team. The "associate" at McDonalds flips the hamburger patties, they don't handle the important tasks. As "associate" at Wal*Mart stocks the potato chips and collects shopping carts from the parking lot; they are by definition lower-level. An "associate" member of a law firm is not the lawyer you want representing you if you're on trial for murder. To me, "Associate" denotes "secondary."

Soooooooo what to think here? Am I overreacting? Or should I confront the company about the job title? After 20+ years in my field, I'm not excited about being an "Associate" anything. Thanks!

I've noticed and heard from downline managers that new junior hires care a lot about their job titles. E.g., I have junior program analysts that really don't like the "junior" part of the title. One in particular told her team lead that it's an "unnecessary part of her title." It's not; we literally have labor categories, that's how we bill the client.

I personally don't care, it's fine if they refer to themselves simply as analysts or program analysts in casual conversation if it makes them feel better. People have always cared about title prestige to some degree, but it definitely feels more pointed recently. Not sure what it says or means. My best guess is it's part of a larger desire to be taken more seriously, but I'm not sure what's driving that in the moment.

I’ve managed to take ownership of a product line at a small company and lead all the software dev for that product. Granted, it’s an army of one situation. However, I’m making all the software decisions, designing everything, and working with the other teams on areas of overlap like hardware and road map.

Everyone tells me I should get my title changed to “senior software engineer” for the resume, since that’s effectively my role. I think leadership at the company would not object since we are negotiating changing some other aspects of my role including salary anyways.

My only concern is when the time comes to apply to other companies, I’ll probably be a better fit for their mid level roles, not their senior roles. So if this is purely about resume strategy, isn’t it weird to go from a 3 YoE senior to a 5 YoE mid level (for instance)?

Take marketing as an example. There are :

- Chief Mtkg Officers (CMO)

- Mktg Directors/Sr. Directors

- Heads of Mktg

- Mktg VPs/Exec. MVPs

And a handful of others that I forget. What's generally the highest ranking positions ?

I applied for a senior role, I have 1.5 years of relevant experience. I ran out of jobs to apply for so I found this one and thought I’d try my luck as they didn’t mention YOE, expecting to never receive a message back.

Got an interview next week and I’m scared they’re gonna chew me up and spit me out. I’m not sure if the recruiter made a mistake but she did message me and ask my salary expectations and I put below what was stated so she must know?

UPDATE: Got the job! And they’re paying more than what I asked for, thanks everyone for the kind words of encouragement 🥹

I’ve been in the industry for five years (2019), took the path of intern->junior->senior->staff across 3 companies, the latter 2 at my current company. I now lead a small team of 4 engineers as a PM/mentor.

I’m looking to change jobs and am limiting my searches to Staff roles, however after a couple of interview cycles I’ve heard back 4 times now that I don’t have enough years of experience under my belt for candidacy. I honestly feel like I’ve worked my way up too quickly and should look for Senior roles again but I don’t know if this would look like a downgrade/demotion on my resume in the long term.

Any thoughts? Does it matter or am I overthinking it? Thank you all in advance

I have a little over 2 years of experience, and pretty much everyone else on the team has 6+ years, mostly senior devs or tech lead. Even the DevOps engineer and QA tester both have 6+ years lol. I was basically the last junior they brought onto the team, and it sounds like they don’t plan to onboard any more juniors or even mid-level devs anymore.

I've been working for a company for two years as a front-end engineer. When I got hired I was hired in a junior position but since then now single handedly push out features that are way above junior level standards (in my opinion but maybe I'm wrong). I'm applying for new jobs currently and recruiters I've been talking to still consider me to be a junior level developer. I have had coffees and chats with people in many different roles in the industry, engineering managers, senior devs etc. all of them had varying stories that were all somewhere along the lines of they were promoted way quicker than they thought they would be. A friend of mine has about 1 year experience in web engineering and was just promoted to senior. My question is, if someone refers to me as junior what should my response be?

As I was working through my job listings feed on LinkedIn, I thought I was seeing a lot of "Senior" software engineering listings being shown to me, though I only have 3 years of experience.

I decided to start at the top of the list and record the frequencies of senior/mid/junior job advertisements based on the title of the role:

• Senior/Principal/Lead: 101

• Mid / no qualifier: 95

• Junior: 4

• (Total: 200)

I was surprised to see that high percentage of Senior listings, so I dug into it further by reading the job description instead of just the title. I found that 40-50% of the listings were miscategorized to some degree. Examples of miscategorization:

• Senior/Principal/Lead position tagged as "entry-level" or "associate" experience level

• Job title says "Senior" but job description says "Junior"

• "Entry-level" position requires 3+ years experience

• Senior position requires 1+ years experience

What's going on here? Is this recruiters / HR not knowing how to create a job listing? Is "Senior" the new buzzword and every company is trying to be like Netflix and only hire Seniors?

I'm based in a large city in the U.S. Has anyone else noticed a similar pattern in their area?

Long story short I graduated May of 2024 and decided to do a Co-op with F500 company. They really liked me and asked me to stay and decided to give me senior title because the salary I’m asking is above the pay range of junior. Should I state my senior title in my resume or should I lie saying I was a junior?

Edit: Thanks guys, I’ll leave the senior off my resume for now. We are a relatively new department in the company so the title is all over the place. My current title is senior data analyst to fit the salary range I’m asking, even it is not a lot. My job mainly involves building data models/ leverage ML to solve business problems. My manger said next year they are going to adjust the title again so I’ll have “machine learning scientists” which is more fitting.