On changes in career paths

A couple of things have changed since the last time I had to be on a job hunt. The most prominent one is the 'Honorary' title that we use as Software Engineers. This might be localized to Mexican software industry though. Seems that I was doing Staff stuff without being aware.

When I first started, a senior developer might have been a Terminal role on many places meaning that there was nothing above that a coder could aspire to besides jumping to management side. There were specializations in fields like databases, business analysis or architecture but it felt as we were all on the same spot.

Then I landed on a consultancy firm that had a more structured approach but still it was a single ladder that went from trainee, various levels of seniority and then something called Consultant with at least 3 different levels; advisor, full and senior if I remember correctly. Still there were specializations but it was simple enough. Consultant was something of a broad term for somebody with breath and depth of experience that could be thrown to a project and somehow make it out alive.

After that it was almost always assumed that anybody with 10+ years of experience was Senior and nobody would bat an eye towards a different title. But somewhere in the middle the word Architect became more used and parallel career paths to Management were created. I spent almost 9 years within a single organization partially shielded from this but now I come to a different market.

Having just finished The Software Engineer's Guidebook by Gergely Orosz seems that I need to reassess how I call myself to prospect positions. And with the inflation of titles, almost anybody with 20+ should be running with Staff+ job roles to be with this latest trend.

Bear in mind, the responsibilities and skills have stayed the same, just the titles have changed. For this role you need to have deep technical skills, experience in multiple business domains and have to be self driven to solve new problems.

Many of us have been doing this for  long while and organizations are taking advantage of the confusion of terms.