Posts tagged Career Growth — AI × software engineering, made practical.
You'll learn how system design rubrics score candidates, and how to present a simple-first design with measurable scale triggers so the rubric sees your judgement.
You'll learn how to run and prepare for an interview round where candidates review an agent-generated pull request with planted bugs, and what a strong review looks like.
You will learn to ask what breaks if a role stays empty, sort the answer into a fire, gap or bet, and re-aim your interview stories and follow-up note to match it.
You will learn how to agree on what 'done' means before work starts, using BATNA and a five-line Done Contract, and how to hold to it with teammates, PMs and coding agents.
You'll learn how to turn invisible glue work into owned, written artifacts (decision logs, repo context files and a rotating glue owner) that unblock your team, give coding agents the context they need, and count as evidence in a promotion case.
You'll learn how to match the four Staff engineer archetypes (Tech Lead, Architect, Solver, Right Hand) to your company's stage, how coding agents change that match, and how to use it in a promotion conversation.
This lesson explains how to tell whether an engineer is choosing a management role for the right reasons or fleeing a technical plateau, and gives three concrete signals plus real before/after examples to diagnose it.
An agent just opened a 40-file Rust PR and you don't write Rust — here's the judgment call that's quietly replaced "learn a bit of everything."
The sharpest explanation of your engineering judgment is probably sitting unread in a Slack thread right now — here's what happens when you redact it instead of polishing it into oblivion.
The engineer who gets promoted usually isn't the best coder in the room — they're just the node everyone's routing table happens to point to, and that's a structure you can deliberately build.
The gap between a talk people forget by lunch and one they quote back to you a month later has almost nothing to do with your stage presence — and everything to do with a document you either wrote first or didn't.
There's a specific second in a PIP kickoff where you can already tell whether the outcome was ever in question — and one blunt question that tells you, before you even open the doc, which kind you're about to write.
Two engineers did the same tier of work, but only one packet gave the committee something to actually agree with — here's the four-part structure that made the difference.
A six-hour Saturday outage taught me that the EM promotion doesn't hand you more leverage on day one — it takes leverage away, and the metric that tells you when it's coming back has nothing to do with how good your own calls are.
The agent nailed every PR I shipped in June, but it choked on the one thing that actually makes a brag doc worth reading — and figuring out why is the whole trick.
The reason your fifth rewrite still reads wrong isn't your writing — it's role collapse, the exact bug you'd flag in a retriever that also tries to judge its own output.
A falsifiable, one-question test for telling private coaching apart from someone actually spending their own credibility on you — the gap that's easy to miss on AI teams where credit for shipped systems gets split by default.
In one architecture debate, twenty years of seniority lost to a dashboard — and once you see why, you'll start hunting for the one artifact on your team that could make you just as hard to ignore.
There's a number hiding behind your ticket count that actually predicts your next promotion — and almost no one tracks it, because AI made the wrong metric look great.
Once an agent can spit out the diff in ten minutes, a sprint full of merged PRs proves nothing — here's what actually gets counted now, and the two-engineer story from PhoenixDX that made it obvious.
Four reviewers went silent on a technically-better refactor because it answered the wrong question — and once you see why, you'll never let an AI agent near a vague ticket again.
Two engineers, same title, same pager — but when the alert fires, only one of them gets watched, and that difference is the whole story of seniority nobody explains to you.