There's a quiet shift happening in product engineering. The tools have changed faster than the craft has, and the teams that adapt first are pulling further ahead.
The new floor
A junior engineer in 2026 ships at the pace of a mid-level engineer in 2022. That doesn't make seniority less valuable — it makes the things only senior people can do (architecture, taste, judgement) more valuable.
The ceiling has not changed. The floor has.
We're still writing the same code review comments we wrote five years ago: name things well, keep functions short, push side-effects to the edges.
What changed for us
Three things. We stopped writing greenfield CRUD by hand. We started keeping a public log of architectural decisions for every project. And we made one senior person accountable for the performance budget from day one.