There's junior in social standing and junior in official position.
If you're told your boss manager will be a 23 year old who was BFFs with the founders all growing up, and you are 35 with 15 years of experience, that's kinda degrading.
If you're a 30 year old with 10 years of experience and you're being offered less than what an undergrad gets entreating into facebook or apple or google ($30k sign on, $50k+ worth of 4-year options to start out with (which will easily be added to so you can cash out $500k to $1M within 6-8 years)), that's kinda degrading too.
Sometimes your specific experience doesn't match the outside world anymore. Maybe you have eight years experience using Custom Designed Internal Framework that's of no use to the outside world. So, there you sit, being judged along side people with eight years less experience than you because all your experience is "hidden" to the new company, their interview process, and your social peers.
There are many ways jobs and the interview process can make you feel less than stellar.
Well, the OP seemed to have something specific in mind and I just was wondering what it is.
Of your examples, the one with less money is just less money. I understand issues with a drop in salary, but the reference to "junior position" above seemed to imply more than salary.
On the first, I've been older than my managers for years now. Who cares? I don't want to be a manager, I enjoy programming. I care deeply whether that 23-year-old is a good or bad manager, but that has nothing to do with how old she is.
Less money isn't always less money. I've taken less money for positions at what I thought were worthy organizations, and was rewarded by being treated like shit into the bargain.
I've taken less money for positions at what I thought were worthy organizations, and was rewarded by being treated like shit into the bargain.
If you're a professional, your rate is market or pro bono. Anything in-between just gets horrible. Your salary is what it costs the company for management to waste your time. If your salary's low, your time will be wasted.
A salary is paid in exchange for an employee's time, which implies that when management has employees sitting idle or otherwise misdirects their energies, the salary is what it costs to continue doing so. But I would not characterize a salary as the cost of wasting an employee's time--just the cost of their time. But you seem to suggest that ceteris paribus, a market salary is the minimum for which a similarly employed person would be indifferent to being kept idle. Perhaps this holds for a small interval dt. I lack the intuition that employee preference matters.
In the sense of "meaning of life stuff" (fulfillment, meaning, purpose, etc). Your salary is what you charge someone to make you do things you wouldn't normally do. Sometimes, especially in "tech," jobs and natural interests align. In the normal world, that isn't always so.
If that 23 Year old is one of the first engineers and built much of the system then yes, you are going to be junior to them no way around that they most likely earned their spot working crazy hours when the company could barely be called one. There are two sides to every coin, if you want to avoid that then look to join really early companies and be the one that earns the spot by building the system.
If you're told your boss manager will be a 23 year old who was BFFs with the founders all growing up, and you are 35 with 15 years of experience, that's kinda degrading.
If you're a 30 year old with 10 years of experience and you're being offered less than what an undergrad gets entreating into facebook or apple or google ($30k sign on, $50k+ worth of 4-year options to start out with (which will easily be added to so you can cash out $500k to $1M within 6-8 years)), that's kinda degrading too.
Sometimes your specific experience doesn't match the outside world anymore. Maybe you have eight years experience using Custom Designed Internal Framework that's of no use to the outside world. So, there you sit, being judged along side people with eight years less experience than you because all your experience is "hidden" to the new company, their interview process, and your social peers.
There are many ways jobs and the interview process can make you feel less than stellar.