I’m the VP of Technology and Security for a mail-order pharmacy. It’s review season, which means a lot of developers are about to be annoyed about their raise, their title, or both. Most engineers I know either ignore titles entirely or treat the whole review process as theater. Some of that is fair, and a lot of it lands on bad leadership. But underneath the complaints there’s one idea that explains almost all of it.
The best version of it I ever heard came from a VP at Riot Games. He asked a simple question: what’s your blast radius?
The blast radius
Your compensation tracks how much damage you could do, and how much risk you carry when you do it.
A junior developer gets handed a single component inside a front end. If they break it, the blast radius is one screen. Small radius, small responsibility, small paycheck. As you climb, the radius grows. A principal engineer is guiding people, architecting projects, and owning systems that the whole company leans on. That’s why a principal typically makes two to three times what a regular developer makes, and far more than a junior. The money follows responsibility and accountability. Working harder doesn’t move it.
This is the part developers hate to hear, because everyone wants their value to climb forever. There’s a ceiling on how much blast radius one person can hold without managing other people. I’ve watched plenty of engineers decide the review process is stupid when the real thing they’ve run into is that ceiling.
The principal engineer trap
Here’s the cruel twist. If you do the principal job well, you shrink your own blast radius.
A great principal de-risks everything. You build the systems and the guardrails so the scary stuff stops being scary. Companies love that, and they push in the same direction: every process they add is designed to remove accountability from any single person and spread risk around. So if you’ve done your job right, things flow smoothly and anyone can walk in and pick up where you left off. You’ve engineered yourself into being replaceable.
I’ve seen principal engineers make 200 grand whose day-to-day is genuinely boring, in the best possible way. Nothing falls over. They spend their time on net-new work and almost never revisit anything. That’s exactly what I’d expect of a principal, and it’s enormously valuable, but only up to a point. The better you get at preventing damage, the smaller your blast radius reads on paper, and the more downward pressure that quietly puts on your salary.
So you hit an equilibrium. On one side, how much damage could you do. On the other, how hard you’re working to make sure no damage ever happens. Do the second job well and you cap the first. The only ways past that ceiling are to manage people or to work a lot more hours, and one of those scales better than the other.
The market is leaning on the same lever
The pressure isn’t only internal. The job market is pushing the exact same direction.
Right now, if I need a .NET developer or a React front-end engineer, I can throw a dart in any direction and hit a good one. When I open a job posting, it pulls about 300 applicants a day. Our applicant software auto-closes the req after 1,000 applicants, and lately that takes about three days. So the same skills that used to feel scarce are now a few clicks from replaceable, which compounds the de-risking you’ve already done to yourself.
And this is the lens I’d hold onto as AI takes over more of the day-to-day. When a model can write the component, blast radius becomes the one durable measure of what you’re worth. The question stops being “can you write this code” and becomes “what happens to the business when you own this, and what happens when you’re gone.”
Two ways up, and one of them isn’t for everyone
From the principal ceiling, the only real path up is leadership, because managing people is how you legitimately grow your blast radius again.
I want to be honest that leadership doesn’t suit everyone. Far more people want to be developers than want to be managers, and that’s healthy. When someone like Primeagen says he has no interest in management, I get it completely. Forcing a great engineer into a leadership seat they never wanted is how you lose a great engineer. The blast-radius math explains the ceiling. It doesn’t obligate you to climb it.
Bring it to your review
Knowing all this changes how you should walk into your review.
If you have a technical leader worth their salt, this is exactly the conversation they want to have. I genuinely want a developer to tell me where they think their blast radius is versus where I have them placed. If they think they’re operating well beyond their scope, that’s my cue to talk compensation and get them where they should be. If they’re coasting under their scope, that’s my job to name, and to fix by growing them.
You can start that yourself before you ever sit down with your boss. “I’ve been doing basic front-end work and I want to own back-end and touch the database.” That’s a blast-radius pitch, and a good leader should already be looking for it. Because growing your developers is most of the job. If you’re not growing the people under you, I genuinely don’t know what you think leadership is. Everything in this field changes constantly, and there’s always more for someone to take on.
What I won’t accept is a senior or principal engineer whose radius has gone soft. I joined a company where the developers did nothing but .NET and had to file a ticket with a DBA to make a schema change. At our scale that’s ridiculous. We have a million patients. We aren’t Google, and we aren’t Epic, and even Epic splits its workload across the health systems it serves. A senior who won’t touch SQL has quietly let their blast radius shrink, and they’ll feel it at review time whether or not anyone says the words out loud.
One last thing, because it’s the part nobody at the top wants to admit: people leave their leaders. That line is 300% true. Every time in my career a manager was capping my growth, I left. One job I left after three weeks, and they spent the next three years asking me to come back. If your leader is the thing limiting your blast radius, that’s the most important data point in your whole review, and it’s the one they’ll never write down for you.
So before your next review, work out your own blast radius honestly. Then ask your boss how to make it bigger. The worst they can say is no, and what they say will tell you everything about whether to stay.