> the CIA report predates the attack, which is especially strange
It's only strange if you believe the CIA released notes from their super-secret psychic program rather than the more plausible explanation that this is disinformation that was backdated for a boost of prestige.
I've been working in this field for about 15 years, mostly full stack but focus on frontend. In the past couple of years I've been making this transition from individual contributor/senior developer to a team lead and manager role.
For me, what has worked CONSISTENTLY are 3 things:
1. Take initiative: I can't stress this enough. If you act like a team lead, people will recognize you. And if they don't, you should consider whether this is somewhere you want to be. An organization that doesn't help build its talent, is not one where you will accomplish your personal growth objectives.
2. Speak to your Manager: Assuming you are doing #1, make sure that your manager(s) are aware of your career goals. You need to get "buyin" from others in the organization that are able to carve out this kind of role for you. They will also have good advice for you. Not every manager/team lead role is the same, so YMMV in this regard. It may be that there's a bigger need for a people manager vs a technical manager.
3. Stay at a company for 3+ years: The number might be different, but in my experience this is the point, after which you have been around enough time to have been involved in many different projects. Not only will you know a lot of the tech stack and it's limitations, you will also understand MUCH of the business itself. You'll have positioned yourself at the intersection of the business and the technology, and become an indispensable part of the organization.
One of the companies I worked at was a personal finance startup, and over the years I learned so much about saving, spending, credit, loans, income and investing IN ADDITION TO the technology we were building and everything that was powering it, that I was asked to be a part of nearly every discussion.
The "edge" didn't really exist at the time, along with concepts like cloud, serverless. I seem to remember that even CDN was an evolving architecture idea at the time.
AWS et al had not yet turned web servers into a commodity, so it wasn't feasible to "just deploy the software to multiple regions" to improve latency.
Exactly. At an investment bank for which I used to work in NYC, they moved their datacenter to be next door to the exchange's datacenter just to reduce latency.
Because in HFT, every fraction of a second can mean the difference between 10s or even 100s of millions of dollars in profit/loss.