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Showing posts from February, 2020

Career Development for Senior Engineers on the technical ladder

As part of the yearly performance review process, we are supposed to describe what we do and how we add value to the organisation. I am a software engineer by training and once prided myself on being a pretty decent programmer. At this point in my career, I am in a fairly senior position on the technical ladder at a large innovation driven tech company. This means that I now write a lot less code than most people in my team. The dual-ladder career system allows for formal career advancement of employees in technical roles without having to necessarily change into management roles - but still expects similar levels of strategic impact. So what do I actually do? When moving through levels of seniority, my focus has shifted from writing code to reviewing code, then from writing design documents to commenting on other people's designs. I still remember succinctly the advice of a more senior colleague, that the key to getting promoted to the next level would be by becoming comfo