It's especially important at a big corporation to actively take responsibility for your career, and ask your manager about what will affect your career. For a t

It's especially important at a big corporation to actively take responsibility for your career, and ask your manager about what will affect your career. For a talented young software engineer, this may seem fundamentally uninteresting, and you may moreover feel humbled by the sheer amount of money they are throwing at you, so it is easier to avoid this task — and in any case you may be able to coast for a long time if they recognize your talent. Eventually, though, you will run into a situation where your talent and their evaluation of your talent diverge, and you may be blindsided by this, and even if you aren't you will need to make a real effort to realign those. No one seems to train for this sort of career-self-management explicitly, and most engineering managers are actually not all that experienced or good at managing people. Many will try to make things more comfortable for themselves by being less confrontational and downplaying the negative things which will come back to hurt you later. As such, you should work to combat these anti-patterns, asking your manager on a regular basis questions like these: - What are the company's objectives and goals for me if I am to remain in my current position? Am I meeting these objectives? - How about if I want to advance in the company? Am I making progress on these objectives? - Is there any feedback which I need to take into account which will affect my performance review? - I have responded to earlier feedback; has my response been satisfactory? Go over all of these regularly, especially the question of feedback (feedback is much more actionable if it's timely). When you're done, summarize to your manager what you heard, and your sentiment analysis of that. "It sounds like everything is on track for now without the need to make major changes, and I can expect a timely promotion; is this right?" Take notes every time, noting the date. (They don't have to be long.) Keep the notes organized in one location.