Defining Seniority in Tech

I feel like in tech there is this over eagerness to define clear boundaries for seniority, but what actually defines it? Experience? Skill? A mix of both? I feel seniority is primarily driven by experience, but the determining factor is having the skills to have learned the right things from one's past experience, not just having years under your belt.

You might have faced the same issue several times in the past, but if you are unable to draw learnings from it so the next time you face a similar issue you feel comfortable while doing so, I would qualify your seniority in the lower end of the spectrum. If you still offload the complexity of resolving problems to whom you deem your more experienced peers, then your seniority is at least a level below in whatever scale you use to measure it. None of those are bad things, they are extremely common situations you must have in order to grow in your professional career.

Seniority is more related to the process you follow when working and how you carry yourself in the face of adversity than anything else. I would even dare to say, sometimes it is more of a gut feeling, rather than a heuristic you can measure. So, how do you grow into more senior positions over time?

Growth in Engineering, Design, or any creative problem-solving job is mandated by one's ability to tackle a problem head on and focusing on the process more than the solution itself. It doesn't matter if you have the help of a colleague or do it by yourself. It's developing a kind of sixth sense for addressing problems.

In my experience, curiosity, handling anxiety and willingness to face the unknown is the key differentiating factor in a person's growth. In five years' time, a junior with those qualities will be far more of a 'senior' than a peer without it, while being in the same experience bracket.

This conflicts with the usual way of defining growth in companies. A career path can't be ambiguous. It has to have certain measurable metrics so you can be unbiasedly judged against them. While that might be HR's desired approach, I think there are some caveats with it.

Trying to pin down and define something inherently ambiguous will never reach a good and fair result, because you are starting from a false premise. The tangible objectives that compose a career path should be just one part of the seniority categorization. If I may quote my calculus textbooks from university, it's a necessary, but not sufficient condition.

More telling metrics could be 'How was working with this person in X project?', 'Did they take on challenges and solved them primarily on their own?', 'Did they contribute something else other than pure product work to the team? How valuable was it?'. Depending on your current seniority, these questions gain or lose weight. While making non-product contributions to the team is a worthwhile goal for a junior, I wouldn't expect them to make such contributions, nor hold it against them if, in fact, they don't. I would categorize those unexpected nice-to-haves as the hints that point towards special individuals, who will probably have non-linear growth in their careers.

You might be thinking that the examples above are actually measurable metrics, but to me they are feelings around completed work. They focus more on the how, rather than the actual end result. They focus more on the process which is the key telling sign of seniority and that, you can feel, not measure.

Nailing the seniority definition is extremely hard. I think a good system places the focus on both intrinsic qualities (initiative, independence, calm resolve in stressful situations, curiosity) and extrinsic metrics (years of experience, completed projects). As I mentioned before, you can't have one without the other. The challenge is to strike the right balance between the two.

So next time you evaluate a worker, don't assume everything based on the number of years they have professionally worked. Try and look at other aspects of that person’s work than just the common measurements for performance. You might be missing out on extremely talented folk who deserve a shot. Seniority isn't just about the years, it's about the journey and the learnings through them.