Probably skirting the line for rule 3 here but I am desperate for frank advice.

I work in a team and org that has middling to low technical maturity, basically an engineering team in a non-engineering org. I have watched mids (2-4 yoe) who I felt were fine for their level of experience rapidly get promoted to Senior and in one exceptional case, Staff. I am a Senior with ~12 yoe and frequently try to guide these less experienced engineers and non-technical managers away from various architectural pitfalls but it can be summed up as they are fine at executing on tightly scoped features and struggle to see the forest for the trees in larger projects. Architecture decisions are socialized in the team but I am not a tech lead and they do not report to me.

They are enthusiastic however and will genuinely swing for the fences, sometimes fail because of poor choices (there aren't enough tech leads / engineering managers to meaningfully oversee such things) and yet will then be praised for striding into the fire to fix the issues that they themselves are responsible for. AI is accelerating these trends in all the ways you'd expect. In private these same people have frequently conceded to me on multiple occasions that I was right to push back and they were wrong to forge ahead with a misaligned solution.

For my part I have had consistent feedback from peers & managers that I am technically strong, I've been at current company for 4-5 years without a promotion and switched teams roughly 2 years in for career alignment purposes which has likely hurt my overall progression. I've had a revolving door of 5 line managers in 2 years who all say they will work with me to build a case for my promotion and then it is news to the incoming manager at review time every year. In my own assessment I am probably not the easiest person to get along with if we don't see eye to eye on technical matters and I feel that is probably holding me back even though I feel in my bones that I have the best interests of the team/business/customers at heart and a perspective shaped by depth of expertise that is largely lacking in our current team.

This is a brief summary from my flawed/imperfect perspective, what does this read as to you fellow experienced devs / what do I do here? I feel that I have reached the "what got you here, won't get you there" threshold in my career where I recognize that code is just the tool we use to solve problems but I don't want to give up on caring about quality or pushing people to do do better but by all accounts I am not accomplishing that when it comes to influencing others.

I don’t think this is normal but I just wanted to poll the hive mind to confirm my suspicions… the principal engineer at my company has now rewritten several of my PRs and done the same to a couple other colleagues. He also has abruptly taken over projects at the same time.

I have never seen this before. Frankly I consider it to be a huge waste of his time, it’s extremely demotivating, prevents new employees from learning and has created a toxic culture because there’s no reason to put in any effort when he might come along and steal your project out from underneath you with no warning.

What do you all think? He (and the rest of his team in another country) consider this behavior normal.

This thread is specifically for sharing "wins". I.e. the opposite of our Tuesday venting thread.