3 posts tagged with "career"

A senior engineer at a mid-sized startup recently got a mediocre performance review. Their velocity was inconsistent — some weeks they shipped a ton of code, others almost nothing. Their manager, trained on traditional SWE frameworks, marked them down for output variability. Six weeks later, that engineer left for a competing team. What the manager didn't understand: the engineer's "slow" weeks were spent building evaluation infrastructure that prevented three categories of silent failures. Without it, the product would have been subtly broken in ways nobody would have noticed for months.

This pattern is playing out across engineering orgs right now. Teams that built their career ladders for deterministic software systems are applying those same frameworks to AI engineers — and systematically misidentifying their best people.

Every engineering organization has them. They don't own a product. They don't ship features users see. But without them, nothing works. They're the engineers who write the ETL pipeline that moves data from the billing system to the analytics warehouse. The ones who build the webhook handler that keeps Salesforce in sync with the internal CRM. The ones who maintain the API adapter layer that lets the mobile app talk to three different backend services that were never designed to talk to each other.

They are the glue engineers, and their work is the first category of software engineering being fully absorbed by AI agents.

The great plateau is the career state that the maintenance of the status quo consumes all your time and energy so that you cannot break through and reach the next level of your life.

Here is some advice to help you move forward.

1. Analyze for yourself based on lessons from others. Set clear and long-term goals.​

What are the factors that are pumping or dumping you? Are those factors serving your goals instead of contradicting your goals? Are those goals aligning with each other instead of violating each other?

Be realistic and refer to the base rate ratio when analyzing and setting the goal. For example, Jeff Bezos told a story about a handstand coach’s experience - most people believe that they can learn handstand in two weeks; however, it usually takes six months. When you get stuck, the answers are more likely to be from others, from reality, not from yourself.

Stop aiming at a moving target. Your current situation is possibly what you desired four or five years ago. Don’t be too greedy :)

2. Release burdens and optimize the process.​

More specific to those dumping you and wasting your time and energy, could we remove those costs? Maybe that will hurt the upside temporarily; however, could that be the hockey stick growth afterward?

Take a sheet to list your daily operations and mark them as burdens or not. If yes, how to remove them?

3. Make time for deliberate curiosity.​

To shake yourself to leave the local optima, you need to set aside some time specifically for something new. The process seems useless at the beginning and may take long time.

You have to be patient. Like what Steve Jobs did when he returned to Apple after the exile, he cut less profitable product lines and waited for the next big wave.

4. Invest in infrastructures.​

Business is an infinite game, and you can always accumulate comparative advantages over time. If you have some extra time and are not sure of a clear goal for now, you could always invest in yourself - better mental and physical health to help you fight through battles in the future. Keep learning and knowing more to increase the probability of success. Optimize the business to work more efficiently and live longer on the market.

Finally, do not underestimate your growth. There is a deception phase even with prominent technologies like AI or 3D printing; they seem not to progress for a long time and then suddenly improve at an exponential rate.