I have been fortunate enough to stay at the same company for close to a decade. In that time I have had four different managers, and I have been promoted four times. Career progression is easier to read looking back: the dots connect in hindsight in a way they never did while I was living them.

I remember being very ambitious early on and setting goals that look a little wild now, like reaching the top of the ladder within five years. I worked really hard toward that. Then something happened (a reorganization, a new priority, a new manager) and I ended up on a different team. That happened more than once, and almost never because I chose it.

Spinning the tires

My recollection, from my own experience, is that every team switch stalls a career for six to twelve months. I think the reason is trust. You have to rebuild it with a new team and new leads, and depending on what the team works on, you have to really gel with it before you can start delivering outsized value.

I think of it like warming up the tires on a Formula One car. The tires have to be warm before they grip the track. Until then, you are literally spinning your tires. That is what those six to twelve months feel like: the engine is running, you are pushing, and very little of it reaches the road.

If you stay with the exact same colleagues, the same management structure, and the same manager, I think you should climb the ladder much faster. You are not spending time on transitions. You own a product long term. You become a subject matter expert (SME) by osmosis, just by being there.

Teams also move people for reasons that are not about any one person. Sometimes people get moved around to find a place where they can belong for the long term. Sometimes leadership reorganizes because it wants the team to go faster. And a lot of times the market makes the change. My most recent team moved into artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure because that is the hottest part of the market right now; before that, it was a different kind of infrastructure.

Change became the skill

Those early changes were the day-to-day kind: a new team here, a new manager there. I did not choose most of them. But they put me in a good position for when a bigger change arrived, one driven from outside the company rather than inside it. By then I had gotten very good at change.

I did not think of that as a positive at the time. Now I do. Going into a new team and figuring out the fastest way to make a dent in its features is a skill. I think of it as a flywheel. Every time you switch teams or switch focus to a new area, the flywheel stops. My job is to get it spinning again. It takes a lot of work to get it going, but once it is going, the job is just to keep it going.

Stable teams build a different strength. A team that has not had a manager change or a focus change can get very comfortable doing the same thing, better and faster each time. You go deep into your context and your area, and that is great. But the moment a change arrives that nobody planned for, it gets difficult.

In a lot of ways I am now thankful for the changes of the last few years, because adapting is one of my skills. I can switch teams and switch contexts quickly. Part of the reason I created the Quest Engine was exactly this question: how do you keep up with change, and how do you orient yourself automatically when it arrives?

Where you land shapes the ladder

Everybody's career is different, and a lot of the difference comes from where you land. Some managers promote people faster and some promote slower. Some teams have bigger scope, where a small change moves a big lever, and some teams have huge levers to begin with.

On an infrastructure team, you often have to stay closely aligned with your management chain so the work you do at the infrastructure level is actually rewarded, and the front-facing teams are not the only ones getting the credit. It also becomes very apparent that the closer you are to the money, the faster you bubble up. The more expensive the thing you work with, the bigger your scope and the bigger your piece of the pie. Sometimes you get to make those decisions and a lot of times you do not. The career ladder looks very different on a team that makes money than on a team that saves money, or on a team that only spends money without making any. All of those forces shape your progression whether you like it or not.

What the market values also moves. Back in the day, security was something everybody wanted but nobody wanted to invest in. Now it seems to be a P0 (the top priority, the thing that must ship), a minimum that everybody expects. That is a good thing. And before AI agents, companies wanted people who were experts in one single thing, and they got breadth by hiring multiple experts in multiple things. Now agents are able to bring a lot of depth, and the people in demand are the ones skilled at managing multiple agents, even a fleet of them.

Change is the constant

At the end of the day, change in a career is inevitable, and a career is very personal. You should not compare yourself with other people. Compare yourself with who you were a year ago, or a decade ago.

There is a line often attributed to Bill Gates that has stuck with me: most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years. I have found that to be completely true. A lot of times I have stopped myself from starting something because I thought it would take too long. But ten years is a long time. It is also a short time if you have a lot you want to accomplish.

In about ten years, the software industry went from a shortage of software engineers to an abundance of them, because of layoffs, and now there is a new kind of intelligence being marketed as ready to take the lion's share of engineering roles. I do not think software engineers are going away. I think the role of software engineering is changing, and I think that is a good thing. I am thoroughly aligned with the change that is coming to the industry.

Change has been the only constant in software engineering for a long time. What feels different now is how quickly the way of work itself is changing. I do not think the way software engineers worked will look remotely similar to what we will be doing five years from now. The roles are going to change, and that is probably a good thing.

Every team change cost me months of spinning tires. Enough of them taught me how to warm the tires faster, and that turned out to be the skill the next five years will ask for.