Finding Scope To Grow

We walk through how to evaluate whether a team offers real scope for growth—one of the most important factors for long-term career progression.

Here are the core points from the lesson:

• We suggest assessing a team’s track record of major launches: frequent, meaningful wins signal room for impactful work, while long dry spells often indicate a team that is either too new (unstable) or too mature (no hard problems left to solve).
• We point out that very mature orgs like core Facebook Feed may be so optimized that it’s nearly impossible to produce meaningful results, making promotions extremely difficult; meanwhile, very new orgs offer big scope but come with chaos and uncertainty.
• We recommend examining the level distribution on the team: a healthy mix of engineers more senior and more junior than you enables both mentorship (learning) and leadership (scope creation), whereas being the most junior or most senior can severely limit growth.
• We advise deeply evaluating the engineering manager’s track record—whether they have successfully grown people from junior → mid-level → senior → staff—because a strong EM accelerates your development, while a newly minted or unproven EM introduces career risk.