I'm Jon. I've spent the last decade at Heroku scaling Postgres, Valkey, and Kafka in production and made Principal Engineer last year. I recently departed from my position to build Proving.
For most of that decade I've also been the person engineers come to when they want a real opinion on their career. Resume reviews, mock interviews, comp questions. The pattern across hundreds of those conversations is that most engineers are operating without an honest instrument. Their resume is polished, their perf reviews are green, and their actual market position has drifted further than they realize.