to JS Engineers who want to stand out
There’s ONLY one skill you need to master to stand out in the current software engineering market. (pls keep this in mind for your next promotion talk or technical interview) Given that competition…
Jun 2, 2026 · 2 MIN READ
There’s ONLY one skill you need to master to stand out in the current software engineering market.
(pls keep this in mind for your next promotion talk or technical interview)
Given that competition is insane, surface-level knowledge won’t cut it.
Not for Senior. Not for Junior.
That one skill is technical depth.
AI can deliver average answers all day long. If they hire a human engineer, it's because they have the real-life experience of getting stuff to production.
Not because they memorized some AI-generated curriculum.
Whether it is a technical interview or just a technical discussion, what I want to see from you is real experience on at least one serious codebase/production system.
To hear you speak about performance, data integrity, idempotency, sync and async behaviors.
Simple CRUD apps or React components are not enough. AI can do that.
Here’s a to-do for you this week:
Think about the most serious project you worked on in the last couple of years… What are some deep technical stories you could tell about them?
Focus on real stuff.
Things that you messed up. Workarounds you came up with. Anything that shows you went beyond “best practices” is gold.
You can't ask Claude.
You can't check your phone.
Just stare at the blank sheet of paper and type.
Real thinking can be very hard. But such a real story can be the difference between another generic rejection email. Or a "you are hired" email.
And if you would like Bogdan and me to help you master Senior-level thinking, Software Mastery might be for you!
Spots for June and July will be few and far between. We will be traveling a lot this summer.
This might be your chance.
Remember, even a small bug fix can win you a Senior-level offer, if only it is specific enough.
Take care,
Dragos
