As far as #2, I came into a large project at my new at the time company last year one week before having to fly out to a customer site. I threw everything I could find about the project into NotebookLM and started asking it questions like I would ask the customer. Tools like Gong are pretty good to at summarizing calls. I agree with you on #2.

I am at a point now where I am the first technical person after sales closes a deal and I lead (larger) projects and do smaller projects myself. But I realize remotely, my coworkers from Latin America are just as good as I am now and cheaper.

I’m working on moving to a sales role when I see the time coming. It’s high touch and the last thing that can’t be taken over.

I would never have trusted any L4 or L5 SWE I met at AWS anywhere near one of my customers (ProServe). But they also wouldn’t let me put code into a repo that ran an AWS service. Fair is fair

If I remember correctly, the leveling guidelines were (oversimplifying).

An L4 should be able to handle a well defined story

An L5 should be able to handle a well defined Epic where the what is known bit not how

An L6 should be able to lead a more ambiguous longer term project made of multiple Epics.