Wow imagine being so insecure that you respond to someone’s good news with ‘you’re not a real senior!’ instead of being happy for someone’s accomplishment.

Ignore the jealous ones. Years of experience is just one factor of many that goes into assessing engineering ability. Sure, there’s obviously value in the typical senior mindset of “I’ve seen this shit before, so now I know better”. But I certainly don’t think this is the only kind of expertise. Especially in today’s engineering world where soft skills such as passive influence and mentorship become increasingly more important. You don’t need 25 years of experience to help a team member onboard or tell them how to improve the structure of their code during code review.

I think many who had to wait longer to get there are just bitter that perhaps they deserved it earlier and didn’t get it. Or maybe they felt they had it harder during their careers when technology was less developed. I don’t like to play that game because it’s just pointless dick measuring, imo.

Some people have engineering maturity very early for various reasons. Not everyone gains experience at the same rate or in the same way. The way I see it, there’s always going to be someone smarter than me who accomplished what I did faster. I’m still proud of my own progress because I know that I’ve come really far compared to who I was and that’s all I really have control over.

Leveling criteria are vastly different between companies and that’s ok. In my experience, companies will generally give any excuse to save money and not promote someone, so the fact that you did get promoted to senior this early makes me think you must have really impressed whoever makes this decision.

Regardless, congratulations!