[Sigia-l] comment/question on Senior postings

[Ziya Oz]

Theresa Putkey:

> (just one thought)...

> ...(ok, maybe I had two thoughts)

Well, then, you're now officially "senior." :-)

Getting a job and doing it can be, and usually are, two different things.
This happens in many other disciplines as well:

A programmer gets a thought becomes a developer and gets another thought
becomes a software architect, and so on. It isn't that their "seniority" now
allows them to do their job better or faster, they begin to do less and less
of what they used to do.

I always handle the business strategy of any project I'm involved with so
the company has to rely on me to make decisions that can hurt them big time
if I screw up, but I'd never call myself 'senior' IA/designer or anything
like that. Heck, I can't even remember the last time in 15 years I used the
same title consecutively.

Unless you're just starting in the business, I'd regard the 'senior'
designation not as an immutable filter but as a starting point for
discussion/negotiation/re-definition.

While there's a lot of silliness around job reqs (like when X number of
years are 'required' for a product that hasn't even been around for X years,
etc), in the end, a) companies just want to get the job done and b) they are
not going to let you make fundamental decisions that can directly affect
their business until after they form a layer of trust, no matter what title
they give you. That's just the way business works, even if Venn diagrams of
title mongering may claim otherwise. :-)

----
Ziya

Any problem that requires walking on water
as a solution is a problem ill-stated.