Introduction

Janelle was excited. She was headed into a 1:1 (“one on one meeting”) with her boss, Kim, for her annual performance review, and Janelle was pretty sure it was going to be a good one. This time last year, at her previous performance review, she’d told Kim she wanted to be a Senior Software Engineer, and Kim’s response had been, “Well, that’s great! Show us that you know how to do what Senior Software Engineers do, and I’m ready to move you up.”

So last year, she’d worked with Marketing to get their website issues sorted out (stupid CSS issues), and then six months ago she’d written a Ruby script to help her team easily push new releases out to one of their few remaining on-premises services. On top of that, over the last four months, she mentored Michael, one of the new hires on the team, and helped him get over the finish line with a few of his stories. Overall, she felt that she was doing some of the very things that she’d seen other Senior Software Engineers at the ...