One of my jobs, I applied for a junior position (it would be my first "serious" programming job in a big corporation), I went for the technical interview with the CTO, and was invited to get interviewed by the CEO other day.<p>During my interview with the CEO, I was frank with him, I did not went to a CS school, and if you asked me a random CS question I probably would not know, I did not knew how to use properly version control, my skills in the languages they used were lacking, and my OOP skills were also lacking.
But we also ended chatting for about 2 hours actually, his early career resembled mine, and we had lots in common, and were likeminded, the CEO during our chat saw where my strenghts were, and hired me.<p>To my surprise, when I was to do some bureaucratic stuff, my title was NOT Junior, it was "Solutions Architect", that in that company was above Senior...<p>I wondered for a good while, why? The Juniors around me all knew more than me about basic CS...<p>I found out, when I could do lots of stuff they could not, they insisted in using whatever they learned at university, and anything that could not be fixed with their existing skills, they would fail to do...<p>The juniors once lectured me after seeing a "goto" on my C source code (I left it on the screen and went to lunch), yet when I asked them to make a better solution, noone could, all of them create incredibly complicated code, hard to maintain and confusing, and yet they were convinced their solution was better, because their teachers told them to not use goto.<p>After a while, it became clear, that my title was not for my knowledge, but my extensive experience (I started programming when I was 6 years old, most of the other company employees started during university), and my creativity, the fact I could always handle myself WITHOUT learning CS, meant that sometimes I would see solutions that everyone else would not see... Yet, the CS part I could learn, other employees (that were correctly always above my own title) would happily teach me.<p>It was back then that I learned how in a proper company with true meritocracy how titles work... Also, a company that actively avoided the problem I forgot the name (ie: the CEO for example told me he would never turn me into a bureaucratic manager, I was too valuable in the tech, to not be near the tech, likewise, there was junior programmers that he would promote to bureaucratic positions, because they were good for them, but lacking in decent coding skills, making them more valuable there)