Three IC Signalsreading the pull toward craft depth

You are probably trying to separate a genuine IC pull from something that resembles it: comfort in the current role, resistance to management’s demands, or simply not having been asked yet. Three signals separate the real pull from those impostors.

The making signal: making is where your learning rate is highest. When you want to understand something new in design, your default is to make it yourself rather than watch someone else make it, coach them through it, or document the pattern for a team. You learn motion by designing motion, research by running interviews, code by writing it, the learning happening through your hands more than your mouth or your reading list.

It feels like impatience with watching, even when the watching is useful: you sit in a retrospective while a junior describes a decision, genuinely interested, and also aware you would be learning faster making the next decision yourself.

The counter-test: what energises you more, using what you just learned on the next project, or explaining it to someone who hasn’t learned it? If the first is immediate and the second feels like a task, the making signal is active.

The craft-standard signal: you can articulate the craft quality that matters at depth in your discipline, and that matters to you more than the composition of the team executing it. You have internal standards for what “great” means in your specialisation, built through years of work and specific enough to explain to another practitioner, and you care about those standards more than which three designers happen to be executing against them.