Adapted from a talk by 9arm — watch the original video at youtube.com/watch?v=6FMl4YaJnts
The Lesson From 5 Wasted Years: Nobody Teaches You Career Growth
There's one thing nobody teaches you when you start your career: how to pick a manager.
Plenty of people think any job is fine as long as you're employed — and that's a valid way to live. But if your career actually matters to you, there's something you need to know first: the person who pushes you up in an organization isn't just your work. It's your manager. Because they're the one who promotes you.
Plan Your Career, Don't Just "Have a Job"
Everything starts with one simple mindset shift: you need to think about how many years until your next level, where you need to work next. Not just showing up and getting through the day without thinking. That's not wrong, but it doesn't grow.
People who figure this out early grow faster. And once you're growing faster, your title goes up, the work gets bigger, the responsibility increases — your career goes further. It's a tiny mindset flip: from not caring at all, to caring just a little and planning ahead. The trajectory of your life ends up completely different.
5 Years Lost, and the Manager Who Changed Everything
9arm says he's had three or four managers, and the difference between a great manager and a mediocre one is night and day. That doesn't mean a mediocre manager is a bad person — they can be perfectly decent people. They just don't invest that much in your growth.
At his previous company, he spent 5 years without a single growth review conversation. Nobody ever told him it was time to level up or what he needed to do. When he switched jobs, he changed his whole approach immediately — asking himself where his skills stood right now, and how many years until the next level. By the end of his first year at the new company, he told his manager directly: "I'm operating above my level. I'm expecting a quick promotion." That new manager became the turning point of the whole story.
The Career Ladder: Know Where You Want to End Up
For individual-contributor software engineers, the ladder typically looks like: Staff → Senior Staff → Principal → Fellow → Senior Fellow.
The key question 9arm asked himself was, "Where do I want to end up?" His answer: Principal is enough. Watching people who made it to Fellow, he realized the level of sacrifice required wasn't something he was willing to trade. From there, he evaluated himself further — at what age could he realistically hit Principal (his answer: mid-to-late 30s, if he pushed everything he had), and what he was still missing. Technically, he was there. What he lacked was running multiple projects at once, and making the big calls — right now he could only propose, not decide.
The interesting part: every time he talked to someone at the Principal level and felt how much sharper they were, he'd note it down — how many years he had to "sharpen" himself to that level, and which project he needed to lead next to set up the one after that. It's a plan built step by step, not something you drift into.
The "Promotion Package" Nobody Tells You About
Something his old manager taught him, that nobody talks about in school or at a typical workplace: the higher you go, the less a promotion is a single manager's call. For a fresh grad or a Senior Engineer, the manager can approve it alone. But from Staff level up, your name has to go through the whole chain of command, all the way to a Director, for the wider organization to weigh in.
A good manager won't send just anyone's name up carelessly, because the Director doing the screening will cut anyone who doesn't meet the bar. So before sending a name forward, the manager needs to be confident the Director is already on board.
The "package" itself is a PowerPoint deck summarizing past work and its impact on the organization — something you build up gradually over time, not something you write the week before the review cycle.
The Art of Writing Impact: Same Work, Told Completely Differently
The part 9arm says felt best in the whole story was when his manager reviewed a year's worth of weekly reports and taught him how to rewrite them in the language of "engineering impact." Instead of writing "improved efficiency by 5%," reframe it around what that actually means for the customer — the customer launched on schedule, or the team delivered beyond what was promised.
Even something as small as closing several tickets a day could be reframed: it's unblocking teammates so they can work more efficiently, or it's being the shield that lets the rest of the engineering team stay focused on product work.
The exact same work, written two completely different ways, lands completely differently with the reader. That's a skill nobody teaches you — but a good manager will.
A Good Manager Isn't Just Someone Who Assigns Work — They're a Mentor
Three moments stand out as a clear picture of what a good manager looks like.
The first — when the team was short-staffed and 9arm wanted to take on extra work himself so the team wouldn't struggle, his manager stopped him immediately. He said he appreciated the instinct to help, but putting that level of skill into this particular work wasn't worth it — it would tie him to the project for years, when someone else could be brought in instead. Structural staffing problems are the manager's job to fix, not something a report should sacrifice themselves for.
The second — when someone more senior tried to pull him directly into fixing a customer issue, even though there was already a support team for that, his manager pushed back hard. He refused to let it happen and told the other party to go through the proper process — even though that person outranked him.
The third — when hiring for the team, his manager chose to wait for the right candidate instead of settling just because the work was urgent, even under pressure from the team that the work needed to start. In the end, the right person did come along.
All three stories point to the same thing: a manager who thinks about the team's growth and long-term outcomes, rather than patching over the immediate problem.
American Feedback Culture: Blunt, Then Done
Another interesting point is a feedback culture that's direct and unsparing — but once it's said, it's actually over, with no lingering resentment. 9arm confirms this holds true about 80% of the time, and he's adopted the same approach with his own reports: call it out when it needs calling out, but don't carry the frustration past that day.
The Day His Manager Said He Was Leaving
While 9arm was on paternity leave back in Thailand, his manager called to say he was leaving for a competitor (a company starting with "N") — something 9arm had already guessed, from the manager's resume and his pattern of changing companies every 2-3 years, always moving up a level each time.
What made it memorable: before leaving, his manager pushed 9arm's promotion package through to completion and got it approved by the Director — all while 9arm wasn't even in the office. A teammate going through the same promotion cycle helped finish the paperwork. When the new manager took over, he was already briefed and immediately backed it, adding that he saw 9arm as a genuinely strong engineer, and that if he stayed on this track, he had a real shot at being one of the best engineers in the organization.
Conclusion: Not Everyone Needs to Reach the Top
The core lesson 9arm leaves people with: don't waste time the way he wasted 5 years somewhere nobody cared about his growth. Get clear on where you want your career to end up, and check whether your current company can actually take you there. If it can't, change it. And the quality of your manager matters just as much as the quality of the work itself.
But just as interesting is his own personal take. Despite having planned carefully to hit Principal in his early 40s, he says he's not actually that attached to the goal — because he's running personal ventures alongside his job, including a startup and a YouTube channel. If those take off, he's fully willing to change direction entirely. Making Principal would be great; not making it is fine too. He's not willing to force it at the cost of time that matters more to him — time with his family.
In the end, there's no fixed formula for a career goal. What matters is knowing yourself — what you're actually satisfied with — and planning around that, instead of chasing someone else's standard.
"I don't have to become Principal. I could end my career at Senior Staff and go do something else."
— 9arm
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