I believe you. But there is also significant title inflation at that specific company. There is no reasonable definition for "senior software engineer" which has qualifications that can be met from scratch in nine months. What are their "junior" engineers like? Do they have a title between junior and senior?

Like I said, this isn't a comment on the Lambda School. It's a comment on the idea that this occurrence isn't absurd, regardless of whether or not it's rare.

Different companies have different titles for similar roles, and share titles for people of vastly different quality and experience.

Senior Engineer is a relative title. It means more senior than the other engineers at that firm not other engineers at different firms. A senior engineer on the google android team is way more knowledgeable than the senior architect at a local coding shop where the average dev makes 40k/year and has a year of experience.

It is most likely that company simple has a HR policy regarding pay and positions. If you Senior if you earn > $X.

The "Senior" hires may have significant outside industry experience, even if they only have 9 months of programming experience.

The title is a paygrade in this case, not a level of experience.

It is ridiculous. At Uber they hired so many “seniors” that at some point they made two levels of “senior” and arbitrarily moved some folks to the “real” senior level.

You can imagine how well this went over.

Ya I don’t disagree that there’s title inflation, but yes they do in this instance differentiate.