Engineering Archetypes

21 May 2026

I’ve been thinking about myself as an engineer: past, present, and future. In the past, I talked to a machine learning expert about engineer archetypes: Iron Man, Captain America, and Yoda — see 4 types of software developers. Been a while since we spoke, but I have my friend Claude. Video games and collectible cards sometimes represent the characters with power levels and spider charts. I thought it would cool to draw these software engineering archetypes to see what dimensions show up and how they are different.

When I fed in Google’s levels, Claude added dimensions for impact scope and ambiguity tolerance. I would have a different set of dimensions, but I’ll save that for another day. Starting is half the battle.

Yoda Captain America Iron Man
Yoda: wisdom 5, mentorship 5, systems design 5, debugging 4, communication 4, estimating 3, coding speed 2, oncall heroism 2, PR reviews 3, stack overflow 1. Captain America: communication 5, oncall heroism 5, PR reviews 4, mentorship 4, estimating 4, coding speed 3, debugging 3, systems design 3, stack overflow 2, wisdom 3. Iron Man: coding speed 5, systems design 5, debugging 5, stack overflow 4, estimating 3, PR reviews 4, communication 3, oncall heroism 4, mentorship 2, wisdom 3.
Google engineering levels radar chart.

* New dimensions beyond the original 10: NEW Impact scope & Ambiguity tolerance are Google-specific signals that distinguish L5+ levels.