I caught the car | undecidability

I started my first software job out of college in July of 2023. In January 2026, two and a half years later, I secured my second promotion, earning the title of Senior Software Engineer. This alone is not so remarkable as to deserve a blog post – I recently listened to a pretty good podcast featuring an IC who was Senior Staff at Uber by 25 – but I have thoughts on it that I’m choosing to share.

The most interesting point of discussion here is around the merits of having someone so early in their career be “senior” – certainly there are hard lessons that I have yet to learn in my career – but my company does not hand that title out like candy and by any reasonable non-tenure-related heuristic I have earned my role. The second-most interesting point of discussion is around how I did it. The third-most interesting point of discussion is how I feel about it. That’s what I’m writing about today.

Note: I’m not sure how my company’s internal leveling scheme maps to well-known schemes at other companies, and I’m too lazy to look it up, so just know that the progression at my company goes:

Associate Software Engineer (or ASE) –> Software Engineer (SE) –> Senior Software Engineer (SSE) –> Staff Software Engineer (Staff SE) –> etc

Fixation

I had (and still have) an excellent mentor who I look up to greatly. This is a person with whom I worked when I had interned with this company when I was still in school, and I have the great fortune to work directly under him now. He is unbelievably sharp, and has all the intangibles you’d want in a Staff+ IC at your company. He was at the SE level when I interned, and right around the time that I joined full time after school, he had just been promoted to Senior SE. He was two years out of school himself.

When I had learned that, my first instinct was to be happy for him, proud, impressed, etc (genuinely). My second was to want the same for myself. Badly. Specifically, I fixated on the timeline. New grad to senior in two years is an unusually fast rise, but I have a bad case of Why Not Me syndrome. It’s not that I obsessed over him, but he set the bar. And if he can do it, I can. That was my new goal. Nothing else would do. Three years? Five years? Not good enough.

Bad goals

Let’s analyze this goal: Earn the title of senior software engineer within two years of starting my career.

Is it SMART?

• Specific? Yes, it is perfectly binary and well-defined.
• Measurable? Yes, there are clear evaluation criteria.
• Attainable? Theoretically, yes, though I would argue that it isn’t fully within my control, which is more in the spirit of this criterion, so actually maybe technically no.
• Relevant? To what? My broader long-term objectives and core values? That’s essentially the subject of this post, but it turns out: no, not really.
• Time-bound? Yes

Ok, so it’s more SMT than SMART… and what’s sad is, I kind of knew it going in. I remember thinking, maybe I won’t be assigned “promotable work”. Maybe promotions will be extremely heavily scrutinized in this economic environment and they’ll look for a reason to snub me (like my tenure). But I’m kind of stubborn, so I decided I just had to make it happen.

Luck

To get promoted on a tight timeline you have to get at least a little lucky. I was the recipient of good fortune in a few ways:

• My team had a very visible, very important project dropped in our laps on a tight deadline. Our more senior engineers were already very tied up in critical projects so it fell through to me. If I were to crush it and deliver it on time, I could probably push for a promotion to Senior based around this project.
• My manager loves to promote people and is very willing to have the conversation and ultimately give it a shot. I’ve heard stories of other managers within my org who are absolutely not like that.
• Giving some amount of mentorship is a requirement for promotion to Senior, and there happened to be a couple members of my team that needed to learn a few things that I was able to teach.

Ego

Coming into the annual cycle at the two year mark, my manager and I felt pretty good about my chances. We submitted my promotion packet, waited an absolutely excruciating three months for a decision, and then got the news: promotion denied. Feedback was that I was close, and they did not doubt my technical ability, but they just wanted to see me ship a couple more small projects. It would be reasonable to try again in a few months when the mid-year cycle opens up.

I was fucking crushed.

In my view, the minimal difference between two years and two and a half years was irrelevant – the bar had been set, and I couldn’t clear it. Should I even still pursue the promotion? What would be the point?

I pretty quickly realized I was being kind of a bitch. So I dusted myself off, made a plan with my manager to be promo ready by the mid-year cycle, and executed. I got my promotion.

And yeah, I was excited. And proud. I made a LinkedIn post. Got to announce how amazing and smart I am and get validation from my Rolodex. It took a couple weeks after my promotion was announced for my title to get updated in Slack. It drove me fucking crazy.

As I try to live an examined life, I was starting to feel a little embarrassed about the pathologies I had around my title. And as the luster faded, I realized I had relentlessly pursued something that really didn’t serve me or advance my goals in any meaningful way.

For one, I did receive increased compensation to go along with the new title, but it wasn’t even close to enough to justify the extra effort.

For two, nothing about my day to day changed. I’m still owning projects of meaningful scope. I’m still planning, coding, prompting, debugging, pairing. People listen about the same amount (too closely) when I talk (too much). I had already earned the respect of my peers. Why did I need validation from my org chart?

What’s a Senior Engineer to a non-believer

Good job kid – you made Senior Engineer. Now what? Make Staff? Why not Principal? Why not CEO? Why not US President? Why not God?

Think back (addressing you, the reader, now) to the time when you were happiest in your career or academic life. Was it when some sinecurist asshole in a gown handed you your diploma? Was it when your professor put the test score distribution on the projector and you recognized your score at the top? You may have felt good, or proud, in these moments – but did you feel happy? Did you feel satisfied?

Here are some moments that made me feel satisfied:

• When I solved a really nasty bug that was troubling us for months. Everyone else who looked at it thought it was one thing, and I instinctually felt that that just wasn’t right, so I just kept pulling the thread, and I figured it out. I almost wept when we deployed and I verified that the bug had been fixed.
• When I had an aha! moment that allowed me to tie up a graph theory proof I had been struggling with for like a week when I was doing my math undergrad.
• When I was tutoring math, I worked one-on-one with a student who had done very poorly on her first exam and was assigned a math tutor. We met at 7 AM three times a week as it was the only available time across both of our schedules. We painstakingly deconstructed her math education to fill gaps that had formed as she was just passed along through high school. I taught her long division. One extra credit homework assignment was so hard it made her cry. She got an A on her midterm, and ended up getting a B in the class. The way that I felt after seeing that A on her midterm – I have never even come close to feeling like that in any professional context since.
• Last month, when I attended my first conference. I live in a rural area, with nonexistent tech culture, and I work remote, so I don’t often get the chance to connect with like-minded individuals. So just sitting there, surrounded by hundreds of practitioners, having these conversations and debates about different technologies and approaches to the craft of software – I felt so seen.

So, going forward, these are the kinds of things I want for myself. I really don’t care when I make it to Staff. I still bring my best self to work every day, so, at some point, yeah, give me my fucking title. But directionally, I needed to recalibrate. Give me interesting work, and collaboration, and community, and scholarship, and rigor. Going forward, the only person I need to impress is myself.