Howdy 👋

Are promotions all politics? Does being a consistent rockstar developer give you that coveted hike?

Turns out managers are humans too. During promotion decisions, there are visible and subtle traits that make someone stand out. Do you just like working on new features or also enjoy diving head on into on-call issues and fixing them yourself? On seeing ugly code, do you feel the ownership of getting your hands dirty for a refactor nobody wants to do? Do you own each aspect of your career growth or leave it to your manager (aka chance)?

Often, we all know these cues deep within but are hesitant to admit our shortcomings when we don’t get the promotion we ‘clearly’ deserved.

A great read from an experienced ‘manager’.

A lot of the details in this infra-heavy article went over my head, but one thing stood out — separating APIs into cacheable and non-cacheable and creating different API gateways for both. The ‘cacheable’ gateway could then be shaved off a bit in terms of unnecessary security and routing checks. That alone made things a lot faster without additional infra.

I respectfully disagree with Wes and Scott’s thoughts about the state of frontend engineer role. I DO think pure FE roles are disappearing.

I have personally witnessed leaders in both large and small orgs expecting FE folks to upskill themselves across the full stack (servers, DBs, caches, and whatnot), because LLMs can generate frontends pretty damn well. As for backend engineers, I think it’s fair to say they are now expected to pick up stuff that was earlier the dominion of SRE and DevOps folks. Mergers and acquisitions in engineering roles, haha.