This afternoon my friend Z tweeted:
Can we all just agree on these for years of professional experience required for seniority?
Jr: <~2 yrs.
Mid: 2~8
Sr: ~8+
Principal: ~15+
I replied with a "Nope." arguing that the correlation between years of experience and capability is weak. It got me thinking…
My company has guidelines for levels of developer capability. There are two levels of senior developer, and I'm considered the more capable of them. The guideline indicates that most will have 4-8 years of experience to be considered senior, so I infer that if it were gauged solely on years of experience, it would take 6-8 years for me to have my current status.
However, I have three years of experience as a developer. Prior to working as a developer I was a cashier, data labeler, content manager… and then unemployed. I was unemployed for more than a year. In the time I was unemployed I taught myself more than I had learned about development in my work experience to that point, and I eventually started a job as a developer. Counting from then, I have 3 years experience.
So why am I considered senior? Because my company evaluates developer status based on capability and behavior, and uses the years experience as an indicator, not the evaluating condition. I think that its a better indicator than education (I'm biased, I have a creative writing degree) but I don't think that experience correlates strongly to judgment or wisdom, the qualities which we need to filter our more senior devs on.
The only way we can evaluate this is to look at how they behave and what they are capable of… years of experience shouldn't even be used as a filter, though coders with a smaller amount of experience should be more scrutinized than their grizzled colleagues.