Career Development

Your Engineering Career Ladder Needs a Rewrite — AI Changed the Job

A while back, I wrote about building a modern engineering career ladder — the competency dimensions, the dual-track progression, the principle that growth should be behavior-based, not time-based. I still stand behind all of it.

But I also have to be honest: if your career ladder was written before 2025 and hasn’t been touched since, it’s already out of date. Not because the fundamentals changed — they didn’t. Because the job changed.

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Building a Modern Engineering Career Ladder

Technical teams grow fast. Careers often don’t.

A well-designed engineering career ladder is one of the most important tools for retaining great talent, building confidence, and growing healthy technical cultures. And yet, most ladders are outdated, rigid, or nonexistent.

This post walks through how to design a modern ladder that works—from your first staff engineer to a platform org at scale.

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