https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/who_pays_you/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter

disempowerment - feeling like there’s nothing you can do to advance your career.

Fundamentally, software engineers get paid a lot because one person can write code that generates high profit margins over millions of machines.

To maximize your impact as a software engineer means the following:

Getting better at picking more impactful problems to solve.

Continually trying new ways of working.

Building simple code that doesn’t collapse under its own abstraction weight.

Teaching other engineers to work more efficiently and to build simpler code,

Influencing other engineers to work on more impactful problems.

Who pays software engineers I should also differentiate here between software companies (rough heuristic: competes with FAANG for talent) and companies that use software (basically everyone else)

Consider the “data scientist” job title, which became increasingly popular in the 2010s, especially among scientists fleeing academia.

The real reason data scientists are paid is to drive better business decisions. Data and science are optional.

AMBIGUITY

Finally, you’ll find that staff engineers’s job descriptions inevitably include some statement about navigating ambiguity. This is what ultimately differentiates staff from senior: the ability to navigate business ambiguity as well as technical ambiguity

There’s a famous story about three bricklayers in which three people doing identical work describe themselves as “laying bricks”, “building a cathedral”, and “spreading the word of God”. The tech equivalent of laying bricks might be “Improved test runners”, “Optimized continuous integration suite runtime by 50%”, and “Created a rapid iteration culture by increasing release cadence from monthly to weekly”. It’s clear that these three resumé lines are written by a junior, senior, and staff software engineer, respectively.

glue work (vs promotable work) https://noidea.dog/glue

Even more than that, watch out for learning opportunities that you’re wasting. If you’re sheltering someone by always doing something for them, you’re depriving them of a learning opportunity.

Managers: If your job ladder doesn’t require that your senior people have glue work skills, think about how you’re expecting that work to get done.

Glue people: push back on requests to do more than your fair share of non-promotable work and put your effort into something you want to get good at.

https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/new_mountains/

For me, my biggest personal mistake was that I didn’t find a new mountain to climb once I had summitted the ML mountain. I think that ultimately, the reason I stayed was because I was pinned by others’ perceptions of my job: why would anyone leave this dream job?