How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers
There is no standard whatsoever for the adjective "Senior" when applied to engineers:<p>Sometimes it means, "Able to work without someone looking over their shoulder at all times."<p>Sometimes it means, "Able to lead and mentor others."<p>And sometimes it means, "Has organizational skills above and beyond engineering skills, able to lead cross-team initiatives and deal with all the human/organization issues around the engineering."<p>The latter definition is the most interesting to me, it describes what "Staff" and "Principal" engineers do in most orgs. But if I had to pick a line to draw, I'd say that while a Staff or Principal spends most or all of their time working on projects that involve the human/organization issues around the engineering, a senior engineer is one who does this at least part of the time.<p>There are other, perfectly valid perspectives on what makes an engineer "senior," but what I like about this one that's relevant to TFA is that this kind of "seniority" is hard to fake.