Where does this web dev path go?

Are you “full stack” or “front end”? What’s a Swee-two ? Who gets paid more, an architect or a director? How will your decisions now impact your career options in the future? Let’s talk about job titles, levels, and what career progress can look like.

For many of our parents, a “career path” meant doing mostly the same job for a few decades, small raises every few years, and maybe a pension on retirement. For Blacks in Technology today, we have more options than ever before. But what do those pathways look like?

Sharing a combination of industry data and my own personal experience as a software generalist, people manager and project manager, I’ll lay out the common career pathways for web devs in the dot com world. We’ll talk about job titles, levels, and what career progression looks like for : individual contributors, managers, and tech-entrepreneurs.

This session is meant to be a combination of anecdotes from my own career ‘progression’, plus a review of real data about titles, compensation and the career paths that dot coms tend to offer.

For many of us, especially folks of color, whose parents were never in white collar management careers, much less in technical fields, we have few/no models for what career pathing looks like. I appreciate that the BiT conference is emphasizing this as an area, and I want to contribute.

As I have not personally reach the stratosphere of company leadership or pre-50-yr-old retirement, I want to blend my personal anecdotes with hard data. Aside from having worked at a number of dot coms under 500 people, I’ve done hiring for a variety of positions and have seen the wide array of titles being offered to folks of wildly different experience/skill levels. I’ve also managed teams and done mentoring for dozens of young people who clearly didn’t know where they were really trying to go, or what it would look like to get there.

I think that there’s a lot of value in cutting through that and giving people a clear breakdown of the most common pathways upwards, at least in this industry.