Adam Russell wrote:
I am trying to help a friend find gainful employment.
To that end I have been helping him sift through job
listings.
"Sift" seems to imply that there are a lot. :-)
I have noticed is that my understanding of "job levels"
is somewhat off. For example, I see job listings for a
"senior" developer with 5-7 years experience.
I too was surprised when I first saw such a specification 10+ years ago,
but it seems to be typical. I've seen "senior" specified with as few as
3 years, though 5+ is typical.
Consider, though, that this often means 5+ years with the specific
language or skill being requested. Most hiring managers looking for a
Java developer will consider a guy with 15 years of COBOL, but only 2
years of Java, a junior developer.
There's a lot of technological turnover in software engineering,
obviously, and as the technologies shift, engineers get thrown back down
the career ladder.
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.
People seem to operate as if there is an industry standard for these
levels, and as far as I've seen, there isn't. I sometimes wonder how
sites like salary.com can neatly fit each job into a category and level.
I assume they're doing a lot of fuzzy matching.
Even if you can factor out some averages for these levels, they're going
to be different for large vs. small organizations, and as Bill
mentioned, boom times (when labor supply is tight) vs. slow times (when
cash for raises is tight).
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?
It seems only a tiny percentage of companies (Intel, for example) see
engineers as capable of moving into the executive ranks.
If you're equating career path with increasing pay, and you want to
remain a coder, you either need to aim for acquiring a small handful of
highly demanded specialized skills that take many years to acquire, or
you create a start-up and become a hands-on CTO (eventually shifting
into some less executive-oriented position, like chief scientist or
similar, as the organization grows).
Otherwise if you can leave coding behind, you go the usual management
route, get an MBA, etc. Some transition to sales engineers and move up
the ranks from there.
-Tom
--
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/
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