3 ideas
A competing job offer is the only reliable way to discover your true market value, because companies anchor compensation to what they must pay to retain you, not to your contribution. Engineers who never interview elsewhere systematically underprice themselves and accumulate a widening gap between their internal raise trajectory and external market rate.
Tech companies cluster into tiers — traditional, mid-tier funded startups, and top-paying public/unicorn firms — that differ by an order of magnitude in pay, learning velocity, and brand leverage. Which tier you start in matters more than individual performance because the tier sets your default ceiling for compensation and the credibility your résumé carries to the next role.
The jump from mid-level to senior is not about writing better code but about owning ambiguous, cross-team problems end-to-end and reducing the uncertainty others depend on. Promotion stalls when an engineer keeps optimizing technical execution instead of expanding the radius of problems they take responsibility for without being asked.