What i've seen, from new grad to mid level its generally technical abilities - can you get work done. In many cases by that point youre pretty close to the bar

What i've seen, from new grad to mid level its generally technical abilities - can you get work done. In many cases by that point youre pretty close to the bar for an individual coder - there's only so many hours in a day. At that point the expectation starts shifting to can you increase the business, where coding is a tool to do it. but so is leading teams and training people, if you can increase 10 engineers by 10% in a month, youve paid for a whole new engineer. or working with product to make sure youre building what solves the problem theyre solving. Going really deep optimizing some code path that saves some money might be worth it, and its one way to get promoted, but it's usually fairly localized. Generally the communication ways are more visible and impactful. We have a rubric on what each level is, and the higher you go the expectation on breadth of the org that you affect is higher. Your code, your team, your org, multi-org