Leveling Up: Career Advancement for Software Developers| Peter Lyons
This guide explains in detail the three key pillars to achieving success in a large software company. Success is defined here as a combination of desirable outcomes, including the following:
The purpose of the guide is to help developers quickly become highly valuable to their organization, and to therefore get promotions, raises, and quality of work benefits on an accelerated time line.
However, much of the more general information in this guide applies equally well to other IT roles including system administrators, devops, DBAs, network administrators, etc. A lot of this also applies to smaller software companies, although generally they wouldn't have so many different formal positions and titles available for a promotion track.
This guide may not apply as directly to other segments in the software/IT industry. The advice here is still valuable, but I don't have enough direct experience with the following areas to claim first-hand knowledge of how things work:
For what It's worth, here are my thoughts on the fluctuations in the job market for software developers. The market is consistently huge and favorable. Boom or bust and anywhere in between; if you behave according to the principles described in this guide, you can be assured that an interesting and rewarding job is always going to be available to you. Job security for competent and effective software developers is always sky-high.
