[ecoffey]

While Management usually the only thing equated with "soft" (hate that word beeteedubs) skills, moving up the IC ladder also requires good inter-personal skills.

Above senior you are allowed and expected to go "heads down" (by yourself or a small group) and knock out solutions to technical problems. However you are also expected to identify cross-cutting problems, rally the right people, coherently frame your arguments, etc to move the "implementing solutions to technical problems" needle (even if you don't directly write a lot of that code).

Management also get's the "fun" things like "let's talk salary!" or "you need to improve along X, Y, Z axis!" :P

Just my two cents :)

[fingerprinter]

Oh, I agree with everything you just said. I was just wondering what it looks like from a career progression standpoint. If it's just titles, it's tough.

What you said about those cross-cutting problems and all that is spot on and that is basically what I see sr. engineers and architects. However, how do we or should we even further delineate career progression and responsibilities? And what does that look like? What is beyond those things?

[ecoffey]

I don't know :) titles are inherently political. They don't exist in some platonic vacuum. So some part of the progression is about broadcasting the status change to the larger organization. Beyond that I think the ladder becomes about company wide cross-cutting concerns, enough success to be an internal rallying flag. Things like that.

But I've never been in the position to either be promoted or do the promoting to that level :)