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I still don't consider myself 'great', although I know I'm better than most. What got me to where I am is a combination of "time in seat", "variety of work", "continually challenging myself" and "being curious". As others have said, as you gain more experience, your greatest impact will shift from your individual contribution to your ability to grow and guide teams of people. To be able to do that effectively, you've probably had a variety of experience. You've seen things done well, and also been involved in enough mistakes to understand where the dragons lie. You've been responsible for greenfield delivery, modeling multiple business domains, have worked on codebases that resemble modular monoliths as well as microservices and can confidently explain the potential benefits and pitfalls of each. You've read a lot, kept up with changes in the field. You read other people's code, especially well written open source stuff. You probably contribute to some open source stuff too. You actively solicit feedback on your own code and don't take criticism personally. You've seen testing done well, and testing done badly. You've studied different programming paradigms and languages and become experienced enough in each to be able to make good decisions about where to use them (and where not to). You've worked with multiple different frameworks over 10s of years and can see the differences, but also the commonalities between them. You learn how to decouple your core code as much as possible from things that are subject to change on a whim. Your curiosity over your career means you have picked up adjacent knowledge; business domain knowledge being particularly valuable, but also things like an understanding of the full stack - networking, security, databases, infrastructure - you're as comfortable digging through a wireshark capture or tracing through system code as you are facilitating business/tech workshops discovering bounded contexts. Eventually you become the goto person, the one who everyone wants to bounce ideas off. The no-nonsense person who confidently knows how to get stuff done. And then you start growing and empowering others and realise that's where the true 10x multiplier comes from. That's been my experience anyway. YMMV. |