GoKawiilI caught the car 22 Apr 2026
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.
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