A coaching client once said something in a session that I suspect many engineers quietly believe:
“I’m supposed to get someone I can look up to. I’m supposed to have a normal team.”
She was quite frustrated with her manager. Instead of learning from someone more experienced, she was spending significant energy working around his limitations such as fixing bugs he’d introduced and learning about decisions made within her team from coworkers on other teams.
Her expectation was understandable. Organizations and managers have a responsibility to provide context, feedback, opportunity, and support. We join established companies partly because we expect to grow through the environment around us.
But making our development dependent on that support being consistently available is becoming increasingly risky in the age of AI.
Many managers are increasingly stretched. Several organizations are flattening management layers. Technical and management responsibilities are blending in some roles. Layoffs and reorganizations repeatedly disrupt teams, mentoring relationships, and career plans.
At the same time, AI is changing both the work engineers do and the capabilities they will need to keep developing.
The capabilities required are expanding. The expectations are rising. And the scaffolding for career growth is becoming less dependable.
So what does it mean to keep developing when the structures we expect to help us grow may no longer be sufficient?
The work requires more maturity
In a previous edition, I wrote about how AI is changing our definition of technical competence.
Engineers can now use AI to work in unfamiliar languages, modify systems they barely know, investigate production issues, and move across much broader technical terrain than before.
But access to broader work does not automatically create the judgment required to own it responsibly.
Problem framing, system-level reasoning, prioritization, communication, and making decisions with incomplete information traditionally became more important as engineers grew to Staff/Principal levels. AI is making many of these capabilities important earlier.
AI can accelerate access to higher-level work before it accelerates readiness for higher-level responsibility.
Another client of mine had been deeply worried about their career longevity in the age of AI.
The obvious response to that anxiety would have been to learn more: more AI tools, more frameworks, more technical domains, more of whatever appeared next.
But we took an approach more resilient to current trends.
They built AI literacy to understand and use the tools, while also deliberately strengthening system design, end-to-end ownership, problem decomposition, and cross-functional communication, leadership, and advocacy.
The deeper question we kept returning to was:
What should I become better at that will continue to increase my value as the tools around me change?
Knowing how to answer that question is becoming part of career development itself.
Development needs more than your manager
That brings me back to the client who wanted a manager she could look up to.
The answer is not to lower our expectations for management. But it does help to become more explicit about the kind of support you actually need.
“Help me grow” is difficult for either person to act on.
A more useful starting point is to ask whether you are missing context, feedback, or opportunity.
If you need context, your manager may be able to explain why leadership prioritized a project and what the organization is optimizing for that is invisible from your position.
If you need feedback, bring a concrete situation. Instead of asking, “How can I be more strategic?”, ask where your reasoning became less convincing in a design review, or what you could have done differently to influence a cross-team decision.
If you need a new opportunity, identify the capability you want to practice first. You might ask to own the discovery phase of an ambiguous project, lead a design conversation, or take end-to-end responsibility for a production problem.
These are much easier requests to act on than waiting for your manager to construct a development plan for you.
And if your manager cannot provide these things, ask who can.
A Staff/Principal engineer may have better technical context. A product leader may understand the business problem more deeply.
A peer in another organization may have a better perspective on influence or cross-team work. A mentor or coach outside your company may help you see patterns that are difficult to notice on your own.
Your manager can remain an important developmental partner without becoming the single point of failure for your growth.
This is also the version of “own your career” I find actionable.
Career ownership increasingly requires enough judgment to understand what development you need, what your environment can realistically provide, and what to do about the gap.
The ladder reveals less about your growth
There is another reason this kind of self-direction is becoming more important.
Tech has historically enabled relatively rapid career progression. Engineers could move from entry level to Senior within a handful of years, and some continued into Staff, management, or increasingly senior leadership roles fairly early in their working lives.
Fast-growing companies also created new teams, management layers, and organizational scope. Career development could easily become synonymous with upward movement.
But flatter organizations complicate that model. There may be fewer managerial layers to move through. Some experienced managers are returning to IC work. Engineers may spend longer at Senior, Staff, or Principal levels while continuing to develop substantially.
This creates an important distinction between career progression and career maturation.
Progression is visible through titles, levels, and formal authority.
Maturation is visible in the quality of your judgment, the complexity you can navigate, the patterns you recognize, the relationships you can build, and the outcomes you can create through other people.
One client told me that when she was in college, she imagined she would be a CEO by 35. She is now around that age and is an engineering manager. She sometimes feels disappointed by how her career has turned out because she is “just” an engineering manager.
We are still sitting with what that ambition means for her.
But her story has made me think about how easily we can use the speed of our upward movement as evidence of whether we are growing at all.
A long career cannot depend on a new title every few years to reassure us that we are still developing.
Promotion can still be meaningful, and ambition gives us something to excel at. But if engineering careers become longer at each level, we will need a richer way to recognize growth.
Perhaps a more useful question to ask is:
If your title stays the same for five years, how will you know whether you are still growing?
Growth is in the playing field you can navigate
In a past edition, I wrote that seniority requires understanding the playing field: organizational dynamics, business priorities, and second-order effects.
That idea also gives us a useful way to recognize growth when our title stays the same.
As we gain experience, the playing field we can navigate should expand.
Can you enter an unfamiliar system and identify the hidden constraints around it? Can you frame an ambiguous problem?
Can you make thoughtful tradeoffs while accounting for business priorities and organizational realities? Can you recognize second-order effects sooner because you have lived through their consequences before?
Growth also shows up in how well you navigate people and decisions.
Can you build trust with people who see the problem differently? Can you help a group move through ambiguity? Can you explain a technical decision differently to an engineer, a product leader, and an executive?
And eventually, your growth should expand the playing field other people can navigate too. Can other engineers take on harder work because of the context, judgment, or guidance you provide?
Career maturation is not only about handling harder technical problems. It is also about how much of the playing field you can understand, navigate, and help others navigate.
So if your title stays the same for five years, look for evidence underneath the title.
Can you make decisions today that would have overwhelmed you three years ago? Do you recognize the important questions sooner? Are other people able to take on more because of how you work?
Your title may not have changed, but your playing field may have.
I see this as another way AI is asking the engineering profession to grow up. Our career growth may be reflected less in how quickly we move through titles and more in how deliberately we expand the playing field we can navigate.