Romantic blabla! That's certainly a new one. I've always described my writing as flowery (and verbose), but I much prefer your description :)

Thanks for the response. I think some of your points come off as overly prescriptive and maybe a bit gatekeeper-y. I don't think there's a clear set of things you must know to be... almost anything.?I've seen this kind of take for even entry-level jobs ("if you want to be a software engineer, you must learn these five JavaScript frameworks!") and I don't know half of what they're talking about. Your list is likely painted by your personal experience (which makes total sense), but expecting everyone to travel your path to reach your destination strikes me as unreasonable.

Hopefully your takeaway from the post wasn't that having a growth mindset and sharpening your soft skills gets you promoted. I think there's plenty of writing online about all of the different pieces of tech you can learn. There's a dearth, however, of content explaining the soft skills that can act as differentiators.

I've seen way more people struggle with promotions due to a lack of soft skills than those that have been held back due to their engineering. In my experience it's much easier to watch a technical solution fail and debug what went wrong than it is to watch human interactions fail and figure out why.

Perhaps, though, a better title is "I tricked a company into promoting me, here's how" ;)