Not sure what your next step in software engineering should be?

Most career advice starts with a title. This starts somewhere else: the kind of problems, ownership and impact you actually want — and how to test that in practice.

• —Understand the real directions open to a software engineer, beyond the IC-or-manager question.
• —Separate what you enjoy from what you already have evidence for.
• —Leave with one concrete experiment to run in the next few months.

This result is a suggestion to think about and test, not a verdict on your career.

This version is primarily designed for experienced engineers around Senior level and above. Earlier and later career stages will be modelled more explicitly in a future version.