The Career Path Nobody Explains - Asterisk Pound
Why the software engineering career ladder breaks down after senior, and what growth actually looks like beyond job titles.
This post is part of The Modern Software Engineer, a series on building software sustainably in a constantly changing industry.
The Career Path Nobody Explains
If you ask ten companies what a “senior software engineer” is, you’ll get ten different answers.
Some mean technical leadership.
Some mean years of experience.
Some mean “the person who fixes the hardest bugs.”
Some mean “the developer who doesn’t need much oversight.”
And after senior?
Things get even murkier.
The Myth of the Linear Career Ladder
Most people imagine a clean progression:
Junior → Mid → Senior → Lead → Architect
In reality, it rarely works like that.
Career paths in software tend to branch, stall, loop back, or disappear entirely depending on:
- the company
- the industry
- the size of the team
- and what problems need solving at the time
Titles often lag behind responsibility. Sometimes they’re inflated. Sometimes they’re meaningless.
The uncomfortable truth is that there isn’t a universal ladder.
What Actually Changes as You Gain Experience
Early in your career, progress looks obvious:
- you learn syntax
- you learn frameworks
- you learn how to ship features
Later on, progress becomes harder to measure.
You stop writing more code and start:
- preventing bad decisions
- identifying risks early
- simplifying systems
- mentoring others
- making tradeoffs instead of chasing perfection
The work becomes quieter. But the impact gets larger.
Senior Isn’t About Knowing More — It’s About Breaking Less
One of the biggest misconceptions is that senior engineers know everything.
They don’t.
What they usually have is:
- better intuition for failure modes
- experience with long-term consequences
- a sense for when something is “good enough”
- the ability to say no when needed
They’ve seen:
- rewrites that failed
- abstractions that collapsed
- technologies that didn’t age well
That context shapes better decisions.
What Comes After Senior?
This is where the industry gets vague.
Some people move toward:
Technical Depth
- staff or principal engineer
- architecture
- performance and reliability
- deep system ownership
Leadership
- tech lead
- engineering manager
- team builder and mentor
Product & Strategy
- bridging engineering and product
- defining roadmaps
- aligning technical decisions with business goals
Or… None of the Above
Some engineers stay senior indefinitely — by choice.
And that’s not a failure.
Not everyone wants to manage people. Not everyone wants to design systems at massive scale. Some people just want to build solid software and go home.
That’s a valid path.
Why This Feels So Confusing
The industry rarely talks about this honestly.
Job descriptions blur responsibilities. Titles get reused across wildly different roles. Career advice assumes everyone wants the same outcome.
But software engineering isn’t a single track profession.
It’s a collection of overlapping disciplines:
- engineering
- design
- systems thinking
- communication
- problem solving
And people gravitate toward different parts of that spectrum.
The Real Question Isn’t “What’s Next?”
The better question is:
What kind of problems do I want to solve?
Because once you know that, the path becomes clearer.
Do you enjoy:
- untangling complex systems?
- mentoring other developers?
- designing architecture?
- optimizing performance?
- building tools?
- shipping products?
Those answers matter more than titles ever will.
Looking Ahead
In the next part of this series, we’ll talk about tools — and why they change constantly while the work stays mostly the same.
Because understanding why tools come and go is key to staying effective over the long term.