How do you measure your own career growth?

• 3 main ways
  • Promotion/title
  • Peer feedback
  • Personal introspection
• Promotion + level are the most concrete. If a company decides to move you up a level, you almost certainly grew some amount to deserve that. However, there are a ton of caveats with using level as the metric for growth, which is why I talk about the importance of not obsessing over level here: "How should I think about levels when it comes to evaluating jobs and in my career overall?"
• The meaningfulness of promotion varies based on the company and its bar. Some companies have wide levels (takes a lot of growth to traverse and get promoted) and others have narrow levels (doesn't take much effort to get to the next one).
• When it comes to peer feedback, it will get deeper and more glowing over time if you are actually growing. This is more subjective than promotion, but in a way, more powerful.
• The fuzziest but arguably the most important one to gauge your growth is how you perceive yourself. When it comes to this introspection about your growth, look for behaviors in particular. Concretely, can you look at work scenarios and say to yourself that the "you of today" handles it in a different, much more mature way than say the "you of 2 years ago" would have done? If the answer is yes, then you are probably a better software engineer now!

For more resources around growing fast and evolving your behavior (not just your output), check these out:

• "What's the core insight behind quick growth?"
• "What are software engineering fundamentals?"
• Properly Learning From Software Engineers More Senior Than You