Describing Software Engineers (SWEs)

On Titles, Levels, Salaries and Effective Experience

What’s the difference between a “Software Engineer” and a “Senior Software Engineer”? Is a Senior SWE in one company better than a plain SWE in another company?

The problem with “titles” like “SWE” and “Senior SWE” is that there is no standard convention around what they mean. Technically, anyone can use any title.

This article summarizes how I think about “titles” in general and how I “translate” titles into other particular factors.

Titles and Levels

Most established tech companies have a progression of titles. Titles are also usually associated with some numerical “level”. For example, Google has (had?) the following titles and levels.

Note, Google does not hire E1 and E2s. Google hires Entry-level SWEs (e.g. “straight out of university”) are usually as E3s. Facebook (my former workplace) used the same levels but did not use publicly visible titles.

Salaries

There was an unwritten rule at Facebook that anyone at level X + 1 about 1.5x more impact than anyone at level X. Since it was reasonable for the organization to compensate employees in proportion to their impact, salaries also reflected this…