On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 9:26 PM, Adam Russell<[email protected]> wrote: > I am trying to help a friend find gainful employment. > To that end I have been helping him sift through job > listings. > I have noticed is that my understanding of "job levels" > is somewhat off.
or HR's is off, more likely. > For example, I see job listings for a > "senior" developer with 5-7 years experience. > "Architects" and "Principles" listings asking for > 8+ years experience. > Is this usual? > I honestly don't know of anybody with only 8 years > experience I would want in an architect position! yeah. HR has minimums, and that is a clue to how cheap they'd *like* to pay, if thzhiring manager finds someone barely qualified and tolerable, which HR might think a win. If someone had exactly the right 8 years experience ... it can happen. > I am at a "senior" level with my current company and if > I stick around "Principle" is probably at *least* 5 > years away. I currently have 11 years experience. Sounds plausible. I made Principal SWE at 8 yrs post-college in boom times, was contracting and a Senior through lean times thereafter, finally Principal again at 16 years in the Dot.com boom, and Director/Architecture (which used to be called Architect and still is elsewhere) at 28 years experience, just last year. (yes, that makes me a unix grey beard) Homever, I have a colleague in a sibling dept who made Architect (Dir level, same as me) in only 5 years from bachelors but he had two years of solid experience in school and he has a vision of java project architecture that is a rare thing, and even rarer he had a VP that realized if we didn't promote him before HR was ready to, someone else would poach him first. > The > requirements are written to be quite formidable and > require and great degree of cross-product experience and > industry knowledge. Yes, Architect is usually a rare position for someone who's been there done that and can tell you not only how to do it but why and why not. Typically reports direct to a VP as peer of 2nd rank managers. Typically promoted in recognition of defacto role and to be on VP's staff, possibly as only non-Mgt direct report. Very rarely hired from the outside unless a major expansion &/or housecleaning is under way, and in that case is likely written for someone the new VP is bringing with. The exceptions are Enterprise Architecture groups in Big Firms, where 10+yr Principal is entry level position, and everyone is Arch or VP Arch, but outside of boom times those are unsafe and hard to come by -- and walking on water is required. My team is the happy median, we're a division arch group, so after leaning out a bit we are a VP, 3 Dir.Arch's (incl me), 1 Dir/Perf; and the VP has line responsibility for a related tech team (who are good too, incl several Dir/Arch level). This is a great group, with a fun mix of work. Exactly what I wanted. The other two architects are our Java guru's, we cover the various other layered products between us, and I handle platform and non-java FOSS. Many places you have to have been a team manager to become Architect, which is so wrong, Project tech lead yes, but line management is largely a complementary skillset to architecture. (Even those who can do either can rarely do both well simultaneously.) (One place i was that supposedly had a tech ladder, all the few management-grade non-management tech spots were taken by burned out group leaders.) > So for someone writing code(hopefully mostly Perl!) for > a living should expect what sort of career trajectory? > Do all programmers wind up hitting a corporate wall(age-ism?) and end up > contracting? There's some age-ism but more nickel-and-dime wage-ism, if they don't see the need for more than 3 years experience why should they pay for more? A team of three experienced seniors including an almost-Arch will make more and better code than 5 juniors led by a barely senior having meetings to figure out what the more experienced have scars from, but when plans are in uncalibrated man-months and budgets in headcount, that's not even an option. That most of the positions for advancement are managerial ( personnel and/or project) not technical means most folks facing tuition bills in a few years understandably turn to either contracting or management, or spin up their own firm to do a little of both. And in downturns, all of us face the possibility of contracting between salaried engagements. If you find any aptitude for budgets and plans and progress reports, you will find steadier work and a surer promotion path in Project Management, if only because it's an easier sell to apply same skills to a new problem. A Certificate in PM takes less time and less BS than an MBA and may be as useful, but if you want to be a VP before you're 40 it's hard to beat the MBA if only for the networking and the jargon and the magic cachet a sheepskin has with HR. Look around, see whose job you think you would like to have in 5 - 10 years. That person has rarely been my direct supervisor, but for most folks, that's the easy/obvious path. Find out what they *really do and check your reaction again. When you have a role model, listen to stories of past at launch, how did they prepare to move up? If the supervisory chain is your path, check if your supervisor has a good chance of moving up, preferably around when you'd be ready - if so, ask to be groomed to be the successor. (That should make it easier for them to get their promotion, if firm is well run.) If not, you have to keep an ear out for lateral vacancies, and find a patron. In school, if you found a good prof, you took whatever class they taught. At work, if you find a good boss who is a rising star, become his/her essential lieutenant, and they'll haul you up with them. (This works for secretaries ^W Administrative Assistants too ) To justify charging more than an off-shore body, we need to add value by being here. (Answering boss's email promptly is a good start.) If we aren't doing the management stuff that has to be done near the upper managers, we need to be adding value by special expertise, or collaborating across disciplines, or coordinating the on-shore/off-shore collaboration, or something. Audit, Security, Specifications, final acceptance testing are areas where local face-time builds trust whether contract or salary. To survive as techies, we have to hone our people skills and market ourselves as adding value ... value to someone with budget authority, not just our immediate boss. Remember, it's not so much what you've done lately for the firm (though that is important) that determines who gets a bonus, raise, promotion, or pinkslip, it's what the decision makers at the crucial conference table *remember*. If the SrVP knows you only as the christmas party karaoke king, that's not good, but might be better than "Joe Who?". That lesson comes hard to many of us techies... very hard some times. -- Bill [email protected] [email protected] _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
