Career Planning as an Individual Contributor Software Engineer

As a Principal Software Engineer, I get to see a lot of folks joining the industry and trying to find their footing to climb the software engineering career ladder. Some people have a very clear idea of what they want from their careers and some have no idea what the next levels look like – or that there are levels above their current level. It’s not their fault though since a lot of companies have different ideas for what software engineers should be doing at what level. Some companies that employ software engineers don’t even have software as their core product (sometimes software engineering is a pure cost centre) who then don’t put as much value into career development for potentially their most expensive resource. Some don’t even have levels for software engineers and have non-standardized structures. This leads to mismatching skills to requirements and stunted career growth. If you’re reading this and are currently a software engineer in one of the Western countries (USA, UK, Canada, countries in Europe, and I’ll count Australia because why not) then we can count ourselves lucky that the income levels allow us to live a comfortable life. Unfortunately, it’s not the same situation outside of Western countries, but hopefully, some of the content in this post will still be helpful for you. <a href="https://medium.com/better-programming/career-planning-as-an-individual-contributor-software-engineer-cbed3e063a69">Read More</a>