One confounding factor not considered here is the number of "senior" engineers with less than 4yr work experience. Seriously, title inflation is just as rampant if not more in the tech sector than wage inflation. So how do you account for Senior Engineer vs here's a job we'll just add this nice title to.
My understanding that seniority had more to do with whether people report to you/you have more experience with the relevant tech stack than the not-Senior Engineers, in terms of being able to produce results. Why exactly does number of years have to be the only metric to measure seniority?
If say, my former classmate has been at a company for 3 years right out of college, and I was at a different employer(s) working on a different stack for the same 3 years. And then I join his company, I think it would make sense for him to be a senior engineer while I'm not, even though we have the same "experience as engineer" as far as time goes.
Although really, titles don't mean anything in the tech sector anyway, so not like that makes a difference. It's the company structure that matters a lot more.
It is completely arbitrary. At our company the entry level developer is "Senior <language> Developer". It is literally the lowest developer title you can have.
It's all over the place. A college dropout who starts a start-up as CTO then fails within the year will apply as a senior. But, it's one of those things where I don't judge a book by its cover in either direction. After talking to the person in the right context there's a certain confidence and deep level of understanding that I expect from senior engineers and it never reflects their years of experience.
Yep, I agree with all of that. A lack of a cut-and-dried definition in terms of years or other objective measurements makes it hard to compile data, but that is exactly how I think of a senior developer.
