Free checklist
Find the bottleneck holding your career back.
A short diagnostic for software engineers. Score five areas, find the one that is actually blocking you, and get the first action that fixes it. Plus occasional notes on interviews, architecture and staff-level growth.
Send me the checklist
Enter your email and I will send you the Developer Career Bottleneck Checklist, plus the occasional practical note. No noise.
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What you get
Most engineers assume they are stuck because they need more knowledge. Usually the real bottleneck is somewhere else. Score each area below from 1 (weak) to 5 (strong). Your lowest area is almost always the thing to fix first.
Read the full checklist1. Visibility and signal
- Recruiters and hiring managers can tell what I am good at in under ten seconds of reading my profile.
- My resume shows impact and decisions, not a list of responsibilities and technologies.
- My LinkedIn headline and About section are written for the role I want next, not the one I have.
- People outside my current team know what I work on and what I am known for.
2. Interview performance
- I can give a clear first sentence, then add depth, instead of talking until I run out of ideas.
- I hold up when an interviewer challenges my answer with trade-offs, failure modes and follow-ups.
- I have a repeatable structure for system design and behavioral rounds, not a fresh improvisation each time.
- I am answering at the level I am interviewing for, not one level below.
3. System and architecture judgment
- I reason from constraints first, then choose patterns, rather than reaching for a familiar architecture.
- I can name state ownership, failure modes, rollout risk and observability for a design, not just the happy path.
- I can turn a decision into a short written document other teams can understand and challenge.
- I am trusted to make calls that affect more than my own feature.
4. Scope and staff-level influence
- I regularly work on problems that affect more than one team.
- My impact is visible in the work of other engineers, not only in my own commits.
- I use reviews, RFCs and mentoring to make my judgment durable instead of repeating it in private.
- People bring me in early on decisions because my input changes the outcome.
5. Leadership and direction
- I can move work through people, not only through my own code.
- I give feedback and run reviews in a way that grows the people around me.
- I am deliberate about where I spend energy: building, leading, consulting or going independent.
- I know which of these directions I am actually trying to grow into over the next two years.
How to use your result
- Find your lowest-scoring section. That is your current bottleneck, regardless of how strong the others feel.
- Pick the one path named under that section and take its first action this week.
- Re-score in a month. When the lowest area moves up, your next bottleneck is usually the new lowest one.
- Do not try to fix all five at once. Career progress is almost always one bottleneck at a time.
