I didn’t understand that myself until a decade ago. Before the gatekeeping starts (not by you), yes it got me through a 5 round behavioral loop at BigTech (AWS’s consulting department) and after leaving, now a “staff software architect” at a third party consulting company (both full time direct hires).
> ensure the project or major feature I was over was done on time, on budget and meets requirements.
The issue with this is that the bounds are drawn by someone else, the best you can do is 'meet them'. No one really cares if you save 90% of the budget, it was already allocated and will just get funnelled off somewhere else. It doesn't matter if it's early, because they probably didn't need it until they said they needed it, and 'meets requirements' is a given.
Compare this to a sales job or something more outward facing, a sales person might have targets but can blow them out of the water with some luck and skill (and get paid commission). They aren't operating within someone else's small framework, but a free variable against the open market.
It’s not that simple. It’s a negotiation up front if you are responsible for a feature/project. You talk to the stakeholders and let them prioritize what’s most important - budget, time, requirements - and you talk to them about the tradeoffs.
Your leverage comes from working on larger more impactful projects that have more impact and scope.
As a mid level employee I was responsible for smaller projects, now I’m responsible for larger projects with multiple “work streams”, more people under me and closer to the “business” and sales”
Also equally thankless when one team meets all goals/deadlines for their small product but the rest of the department is a dumpster fire — making the entire product suite unusable.
I like to call that not being on the critical path of company success: whenever you can, push to get your team onto that path, and if management can buy into OKR as methodology, which can help achieve valuable alignment (as long as they don't misapply OKRs for a regular "these are features we want").
My job was not to go out and sale the product whether the product made $0 or $1 million dollars I had no control over.
The other thing I need to communicate is that I am capable of working at the level of scope, impact and ambiguity required for the job.
https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html
I didn’t understand that myself until a decade ago. Before the gatekeeping starts (not by you), yes it got me through a 5 round behavioral loop at BigTech (AWS’s consulting department) and after leaving, now a “staff software architect” at a third party consulting company (both full time direct hires).