The transition past Senior hinges on this exact inflection point. Without articulating whether you're targeting cross-org coordination as an EM or system-level architectural surface area as a Staff, managers cannot clear the right operational runway or sponsor high-leverage technical scope for you.
The three routes to go-to person no longer have equal expected value, and I would say so explicitly.
Technology depth was always the cheapest of the three to acquire, and it is the one that erodes fastest now. The Angular questions that made you the go-to person go to a model first, and the model answers at 2am. Domain depth is the opposite. Why reconciliation runs twice on Tuesdays, why that one customer's contract is special, which failure the workaround in the payments module was written for, none of that is written anywhere a model can read. It is the only one of the three that got more scarce.
On the brag list, a related shift. Faros telemetry across 22,000 developers has incidents per pull request up 242.7% and median time in review up 441.5%. In that environment a list of things shipped reads as noise, because volume rose for everyone. The wins that survive scrutiny carry a denominator: incidents avoided per change, review hours removed, the rollback that did not happen. Same advice, different unit.
Solid career advice, but missing AI specific growth paths consider adding become go to for AI/agent implementation and build internal AI tools that save team time as modern impact plays.
Being a go-to person for certain AI domain, and then proposing and owning the implementation of a certain AI addition (could be internal AI tool or something else), that's a good way to do it.
The transition past Senior hinges on this exact inflection point. Without articulating whether you're targeting cross-org coordination as an EM or system-level architectural surface area as a Staff, managers cannot clear the right operational runway or sponsor high-leverage technical scope for you.
The three routes to go-to person no longer have equal expected value, and I would say so explicitly.
Technology depth was always the cheapest of the three to acquire, and it is the one that erodes fastest now. The Angular questions that made you the go-to person go to a model first, and the model answers at 2am. Domain depth is the opposite. Why reconciliation runs twice on Tuesdays, why that one customer's contract is special, which failure the workaround in the payments module was written for, none of that is written anywhere a model can read. It is the only one of the three that got more scarce.
On the brag list, a related shift. Faros telemetry across 22,000 developers has incidents per pull request up 242.7% and median time in review up 441.5%. In that environment a list of things shipped reads as noise, because volume rose for everyone. The wins that survive scrutiny carry a denominator: incidents avoided per change, review hours removed, the rollback that did not happen. Same advice, different unit.
Solid career advice, but missing AI specific growth paths consider adding become go to for AI/agent implementation and build internal AI tools that save team time as modern impact plays.
Great add! Right, that is a great way to be a go-to these days. Jordan's case study mentioned exactly that in this article: https://newsletter.eng-leadership.com/p/how-to-grow-from-senior-to-staff
Being a go-to person for certain AI domain, and then proposing and owning the implementation of a certain AI addition (could be internal AI tool or something else), that's a good way to do it.