The Four Pillars of Career Growth for Software Engineers

I've now worked at 5 companies in my career. They each have their own career frameworks for software engineers with different names and attributes but they are more alike than different. A senior engineer in one is typically still a senior engineer in another (assuming they call their levels the same thing).

I recently came across a useful lens for thinking about the pillars of career growth that seems generally applicable across roles and companies. I found this useful as a way to think about my own growth and performance without overfitting to a company's particular career pillars and terminology.

Here we'll explore these pillars - the four pillars of career growth.

The Four Pillars of Career Growth

The four pillars are Technical Skill, Project Execution, Product Thinking, and People Skills. The insight is that while being good technically can often get you promoted to a mid level role, by senior that becomes table stakes so you must combine multiple skills to stand out and reach higher levels.

• Technical Skill - Your chosen craft, whether it's coding or graphic design or writing. This is what you get paid for but as you get more senior it becomes table stakes to be good at it. You must combine it with other skills to excel. Example: Regularly landing features with robust, maintainable code that fulfills the spec. Improving systems to 10x their scalability or reduce costs of running by 50%.
• Project Execution - Getting things done. You can be super technical and good at prioritization but if you can't actually move big projects over the line then the impact is never realized. As you get more senior, you'll be expected to lead larger projects spanning more people, domains, and time lines so execution at smaller scales is necesary to achieve these higher scales. Example: Leading a 6-month, multi-team migration from kickoff to completion without big misses (some misses are inevitable, but you can usually recover with good communication and planning).
• Product Thinking - Focusing on impact for the business. Two people can do the same amount of work but if one is more impactful for the business, then that one is more valuable. You have a finite amount of time in the day so eventually the only way to scale yourself is to be better at prioritizing what work you take on. Business impact is generally a good thing to optimize for. As you get more senior, setting direction or creating new workstreams that align with the business becomes increasingly important. Example: Choosing the feature that unlocks 20% added revenue over the one that is technically interesting.
• People Skills - How you collaborate with others. Your communication, how you lead projects, whether you're nice to work with, how you upskill and improve your team and org. We're all just people trying to do our jobs and collaboration can be the difference between all your peers disliking you and giving bad reviews or liking you and giving good reviews. Also it's good to be a nice, positive person because it makes life more enjoyable for everyone. Example: Turning heated debates into productive discussions, keeping meetings on topic, and getting feedback / input from everyone and making changes accordingly so people feel heard.

A final skill is how well you present your work. That's often a big factor in what work gets recognized and rewarded, whether we like it or not. If people don't know you did the work or understand why it's important then it won't be rewarded. One of the best ways to do this is writing - sharing short, regular updates containing project status and impact (with data!) goes a long way and can easily be linked to in your brag doc at review time.

A brag doc is a big list of your accomplishments and their impact with links to data and artifacts. It's commonly used as a reminder of what you did so self reviews are as simple as copying and reformatting the info.

The Four Pillars and Career Level

For Software engineers, the career leveling seems to go something like this:

• Junior: Technical Skill at feature level
• Mid: Technical Skill and Project Execution at project level
• Senior: Excellent at 1, Competent at all four at team level
• Staff: Excellent at 2-3, competence at all at org level

Note that each level is typically a spectrum where the lower side may barely be able to handle one of these scopes and the higher level is able to handle multiple.

Next

I took a break from the career ladder climb for awhile but I've now been at a terminal senior engineer level for a couple years and have been thinking more about what it would look like to angle towards staff. The first step for me is recalibrating to understand where I'm at on these scales then making a plan to get there. That will probably involve improvements to a couple of these pillars.

As an exercise: Rate yourself from 1-10 in each of these pillars. Then compare these pillars against your company's career framework. Pick one to improve this week / month.

If you liked this post you might also like:

• My 2025 Job Search as a Senior Software Engineer - Results, Timelines, and How I Study for Interviews
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