Management is not a promotion

Hey! How’s it going? I’m gonna whine a little here. Can I sit down?

You learn you grow up the career ladder: junior, middle, senior, in some companies — principal, architect. A higher level shows your technical background as well as a certain breadth of knowledge and, of course, soft skills. But then what? What an engineer should do when old tasks are no longer so exciting, and where to go next is still not clear. Do you have to step into a management position to continue your career advancement?

Value

I would like to add such a concept to your vocabulary as “Value”. It helps a lot in negotiations, especially with bosses. I would say that your career success and growth are proportional to the Value you create through your everyday work. It could be the architecture you design, the implementation of a CI/CD pipeline, the successful resolution of a customer problem, or whatever else you can think of. You can measure your work in some value units and look at it as a KPI and help everyone else look at it the same way. Sounds logical, don’t you think? And if you look around and look at people and assess their value — seems wrong, doesn’t it? Well, that’s not what I’m talking about here…

Your ability to program has a limit, the impact of your technical input is not necessary and it’s not measured in lines of code — we…