Career Advice for Every Level

• 28 January 2026
• non-technical,
• career,
• performance-review

5 min read

We’re approaching the usual performance review/promotion cycle and I wanted to write a short post with a few advice that worked for me. I tested them on myself and they helped me move forward in my career. I don’t claim these are universal truths or that they’ll work for everyone or every role, only that they’re practices I believe in and that helped me.

Table of Contents

• Table of Contents
• Advice
  • Pretend you’re the only person on the team
  • Take full ownership of projects
  • Highlight your results
  • It’s fine to say you don’t know
  • Shadow your seniors
  • Write documentation
• Closing Note

Advice

1. Pretend you’re the only person on the team

Treat every request or problem as if no one else will answer it, decide for it, or do the work for you. If someone asks your team a question (support functions like security frequently get these) you can’t think that “John knows this better, I’ll leave it to him”. Instead, take the initiative: research, get informed, and reply yourself. The same applies to running projects or making decisions (see my post on DACIs and RFCs). Doing this forces you to learn, become autonomous, and build credibility. It’s time consuming, i won't deny that, but the payoff is worth it: you become the team’s first point of contact, someone who can handle tasks end-to-end, and that visibility helps career progression.

2. Take full ownership of projects

Own outcomes instead of only delivering assigned tasks. Embrace “extreme ownership”: lead decisions, remove blockers, follow through, and accept accountability for the result. This often overlaps with the previous point. There is a good article on this here https://www.hernglee.com/newsletter/extreme-ownership/ and the author uses a similar trick on the above, which is "act as if you own half the company".

3. Highlight your results

Many people are uncomfortable promoting their own work, but remember that managers and other stakeholders don’t automatically know everything you do, and fair enough: you also don’t know everything they or your peers do either. Make tracking and sharing accomplishments part of the job; it’s simply part of the game. I recommend the article that explains using a “brag document” to do this: https://jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/. I found it easy and practical for capturing and presenting your wins.

4. It’s fine to say you don’t know

As you climb the ladder higher (Staff, Senior Staff, Principal) there’s pressure to appear omniscient. That’s unnecessary. Admitting a gap is intellectual honesty, and often a short lookup or ten minutes of research on Internet fills it. A good response is: “I don’t have enough info to comment right now; I’ll research and get back to you”. Being able and willing to learn quickly is more important than pretending you already know everything.

5. Shadow your seniors

Especially useful early in your career but beneficial at any level: watch how others handle real work. Join calls, audits, or project meetings as an observer to learn process, communication, and domain specifics. You’ll learn how to handle interviews with auditors, how colleagues run projects, or how they use tools like Jira or VS Code. Shadowing isn’t only for juniors: seniors and highers folks can learn from peers who handle niche responsibilities. This is super useful, yet very few people actually take advantage of it. My advice is to exploit this method as much as you can to accelerate your learning.

6. Write documentation

Short and simple: write down useful knowledge, that's really it. Don’t get stuck debating tools: Obsidian, Notion, Confluence, or a plain file will all work - what you use doesn't really matter. The benefits of documentation far outweigh the downsides, the only real con is the act of writing itself, which is also a benefit because it forces you to truly understand what you're recording. Few key upsides:

• Saves time: keep answers to common questions handy so you can point people to them. In time you'll build a knowledge base big enough that you won't need to answer most new questions yourself, and in the age of AI you can feed that knowledge into a model to have the model handle answers for you
• Improves understanding: writing forces clarity and reveals gaps in your knowledge
• Preserves history (Scripta manent): notes and ticket details help others (and future you) when work needs revisiting.

I could list benefits all day, but you get the point.

Closing Note

To conclude, I want to write a short note on soft skills; this isn’t advice, just a brief observation. A typical ladder for higher roles is: Senior → Staff → Sr. Staff → Principal. There’s no industry-wide consensus on what these titles mean, so this is subjective and depends on how you interpret them. A Staff at one company can be called a Principal at another. Many online posts about “how to become a Principal” or “how to work as Staff” are often criticized for being company-specific or inaccurate. Personally, I think anything above Senior blurs together and the distinctions are fuzzy. The difference between Staff, Principal, and Senior often isn’t raw technical depth but soft skills. Both Staff and Principal are technical experts, and one may know a topic more deeply than the other; the real expectation is that they can lead and own projects end-to-end. It’s not enough to simply contribute (for example, by shipping code)—they need to drive initiatives, coordinate stakeholders, and accept ownership of outcomes. These roles remain individual-contributor positions, so technical work is still expected, but neglecting soft skills is a common pitfall: at higher levels, communication, leadership, and ownership often matter more than pure technical ability.

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