The senior you get the more you realise that the only reward for hard work is more work. Then, you learn to say no more often and set boundaries and negotiate like if you want me to work on project A, then I won’t have capacity to work on project B.

Unfortunately, this is something you have to learn through experience and cannot be taught by someone else.

> and what happens is they start disappearing for longer periods of time... they quit their jobs because they think, “you know what, this is not salvageable.”

I've interviewed several great senior engineer candidates over the last few years, and then had to watch do this and walk themselves right out the door inside of 6 months. I've developed a marked preference for promoting internally, because you get longer to head this sort of thing off.

Incidentally, this sort of thing is why software engineering desperately needs some sort of formal levelling criteria and/or mentorship programs. It's really hard for senior folks to calibrate themselves against their rapidly shrinking peer group.

At least we know this wasn't written by an LLM (unless it was GPT-2).

The best advice I can give on moving your career forward is to not try and get a promotion at your current job. Apply for better positions at other companies while you still have your current role. You'll have maximum leverage and unlimited time to choose the best possible option. Trying to claw your way up the ladder in a single company is the least efficient (and more often than not hopeless) strategy.

I’m in this exact position and I don’t know the next steps forward. I’m on a sabbatical because I burnt out after a massive project but the expectation is that I come back and lead another massive project.

I’ve yet to decide if that’s what I actually want or if there is another solution out there. Is leaving the only real solution?

I'm a staff engineer and I haven't thought about trying to get promoted a single day in my life. Do good work and be nice the rest follows

i’m very happy in the “terminal” senior position at my company, there are higher levels but it’s fine to stay at the level that i’m at forever. i don’t need to pick up extra work because im not trying to get promoted and i can usually get by just by having smart sounding ideas in meetings, helping figuring out the more ambiguous tasks and just doing enough to meet expectations. the expectations of the higher levels seem pretty unpleasant , and the guys at lower levels than me are happy to pick up extra work because they want to get promoted lol

Err..I would take this with a BIG pinch of salt. It massively depends on the workplace culture.

Perhaps I am lacking context on the “seniority” of this individual. Unless they are a Principal engineer, or operating as an architect/staff engineer, or as a “tech lead”, I would absolutely expect them to be solid engineers delivering code.

They would have clear deliverables in sprints that would typically be heavier and more complex than their junior peers.

Take this from someone who has worked in all of the above roles and subsequently in management.

If you don't truly enjoy what you do, you'll get crushed by the pressure. Don't try to impress people. If you feel pressure, take a step back, reflect, and think about what's important to you. Then communicate this clearly to people around you, including yourself.

AI coding tools can really make the "in the next week, I’ll do a whole month’s work. and no one will know" feel especially tempting, particularly if you're deep in the execution phase of a project. Truth is that can end up like Brooks's law on steroids.

Instead, just communicate with your stakeholders asap. Chances are they already know the project is at risk, and they'll be amendable to either descoping or pushing back the deadline.

This is fine advice up to a certain point, but you do not accomplish bigger and grander things by working harder, nor even, as this implies, by working more diligently. You accomplish them through leverage.

It is not just about what you are working on. You need to understand what everyone else is working on, and more importantly, what they could be working on (their capabilities) and what they should be working on (the org's priorities). When you find yourself being dragged in to meetings to write roadmaps, estimate schedules, and contribute paragraphs to the annual budgeting process, you know you're on the right track.

He does have one thing right, that this is about reputation, because you cannot just go out and unilaterally take this authority. It has to be earned. Having a large number of lines of code written, commits landed, and tickets closed can be a means to that end, but it is not in and of itself the goal.

I didn’t understand this because of the stream-of-consciousness delivery.

Sometimes to look like a genius you have to look incompetent for a bit.

In a place operating with SCRUM you're often expected to be shipping things every sprint, and sometimes with a large and important piece of work the experimentation, and the building of the thing, doesn't fit in a sprint, and if you tried to ship incrementally you'd just be shipping junk.

So you're going to end up giving some standup updates that do not inspire confidence for a bit. "I tried this thing, didn't work out", "still working on X, tried another thing", etc.

It's possible at the end of it you figure it out, and the result justifies the time investment.

The spiral is friction with a system that disincentivizes taking on ambitious goals.

I wouldn't just blame the engineer for not shipping smaller things, being less ambitious, talking more instead of working, I'd blame the company culture for disincentivizing deep work and ambitious goals.

Obviously there's a limit to this. You do need to ship something useful eventually. It's possible you spend extra time and still fail to accomplish the thing you wanted. It might be damaging to your reputation. You win some you lose some.

With AI there's less time between having the idea to do something or try something, and it being done or ruled out, so I see this being less of an issue now. The main barrier is knowing what to do and describing it.

The single, most important leading indicator of your success will be who you’re having lunch with every day.

I wish that I could travel back in time and tell my 25-year-old self this information.

Please use capital letters when you write.

I genuinely don't want to upset anyone, but as someone with 20+ years of engineering and management experience, I think it might help some people to hear what is most likely really going on here.

This is probably an example of the Peter principle:

The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

There's a huge amount of title inflation going on in the industry. We're now seeing the "Principal Engineer" title being given to people with 3 years of professional experience.

Unfortunately, this is simply not enough time to be very good at all, no matter how much raw talent you have. It takes a decade of experience just to know how to manage yourself effectively, let alone mentor others and lead large projects.

If a senior isn’t doing what they feel is meaningful work - or not communicating what they’re focused on, isn’t that partially on their manager?

obviously, more senior ICs should be creating/defining/delivering their own work. But either way, alignment with director or TL seems like a good idea to reduce anxiety

The scenario laid out is pretty dated. Most scrum shops would not permit this level of backstory anymore. Admittedly I have seen this happen in the old days but it wasnt usually very impactful. It was in places where people had too much time on their hands and not much supervision.

Also there isnt much above senior/lead engineer these days, there is no straight line career progression above that. You can try to get into architecture but thats mostly paperwork, or management which is mostly dealing with people.

If you want to call your own shots as an engineer the world is your oyster, start your own company and build it. There is not much worth "being in charge of" in corporate dev shops that I can see or would want to be a part of. Most of it is retread, make work including FAANG.

> “oh, if I work harder, do a bigger thing, then I will be rewarded with promotions and what have you,” right?

Answer: No.

My plan was to always "retire" to a comfy university job but I no longer feel that way - I still really enjoy what I do.

> he was asking me how to do a 60 to 80-hour week

It's simple: just don't do it.

I have a lot of trouble reading prose that’s written without capital letters. I can’t understand why writers would do that. Nor can I understand why readers engage with this.

Disappearing for long periods of time and the giving vague updates like "everything going well guys" is not the behavior of a (even mediocre) senior. This is the behaviour of a poorly managed junior.

As a senior its your responsibility not to disappear into a cave but to do the opposite - show what you are doing, show your thought processes so juniors can learn. Discuss openly your problems and encourage discussion and feedback and show the juniors that its ok to be vulnerable and not know everything.

Then you have to keep management informed exactly whats going on, where your Blockers are, what intermediate goals you have and progress towards them.

This hits home. Had the _exact_ scenario play out last year at my last role

  > the thing they do is they tell themselves they need to almost cosplay being a more senior engineer than they are.

Isn't this explicitly written in every promotion guide? Every one I've ever read says you need to be working at X level for Y months before getting promoted to X. Thats not delusion, that's codified. There's good reason people work like that.

  > like, for two, three weeks, you won’t hear anything from them.

Two might be fine, three is probably pushing it, but a lot of times this is just bad communication (which I think is more the point). But also our field is extremely rushed for some reason, especially with AI. Sometimes things do take time. Honestly, I think the whole industry could move a heck of a lot faster if we just cooled our jets for a bit. Innovation doesn't happen by slamming your head against the wall, it happens in the quiet moments after lots of head banging. But our culture acts like we can brute force our way.

We constantly say "I'll fix it later" and we never do or do it when the problem has turned from a small one into a big one. Why can't we fix problem while they're still small? It's penny wise and pound foolish. Does your manager actually know if it will become a big problem? More than you, the person in the weeds? How would they even know? Would you even tell them? Are you afraid to tell them?

We're constantly jumping from bandwagon to bandwagon, not taking any time to even check where we are or look up to see where we're going. And we attack anyone who pokes their heads up like we're afraid we'll get hosed reaching for a banana.

Is it really any wonder people burn out? You can't operate at high anxiety forever.

sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

I've interviewed for several senior jobs lately. And found that the more pragmatic and honest I was, the quicker I was dropped from the pipeline.

It goes both ways, and I would argue the spiral happens because the other side expects something above an beyond the possible.

I leave because it stops being "fun". The way my father put it is "when you start a job, they hand you 2 buckets. One they fill with money. The other they fill with crap. When the bucket of crap weighs more than the bucket with money, you leave."

It is hard to take almost any mentorship program seriously that is not a formal university education, and even then, at most universities they do not teach skills that are directly applicable at companies given they are not intended to directly be job training programs. Not that I am on any hiring committee currently, but if I was, I would rather see a candidate with a degree and open source project contributions than App Academy dreck, for example.

If every senior you hired left in 6 months, there is something wrong with your company. Likely on three levela ends - when evaluating people, when telling them who you are so that they can select themselves out and when they are in.

Btw the same goes for when every junior leaves in 6 months. Or whatever demographic group.

I guess "senior" just means older, but in the usual sense, the more senior you are, the more your job involves coordinating with other people. So I don't see how you could disappear when promoted. But I think in this case it's just "you do more work".

The 'job hopping advice' is always so one-dimensonal as if salary maxing is the only metric that counts. You should always take everything into account

- work climate and coworkers - work life balance - legal rewards for staying (This might not apply to the US but in most of Europe you get progressively harder to fire the longer you stay at one company)

I don't agree with that advice.

Interviewing sucks. I know, if you currently have a job then you don't lose anything. Other than precious time and I already feel like I don't have enough free time, I don't want to invest the remaining interviewing.

I have been in a few companies and yes, sometimes getting a promotion is literally impossible. I remember one company that didn't give me a promotion until I threatened to leave.

But if you find the right company, then you shouldn't even need to ask for a promotion.

And lastly, I would hope you are working for a company that you care about. That makes it more complicated to find a replacement

This used to be true during the zero interest rate days when you could leapfrog up the chain but I think the times have changed.

By all means keep your eyes open outside of your org, but it's increasingly hard to even get a resume seen by a human on the other side of the hiring process.

If you have a good reputation on your current team, that places you above external candidates as you look to move up in your organization. Don't ignore that.

“Your job isn’t your job. Your job is to find your next career step.” Paraphrasing from memory from Scott Adams’ “How to fail at almost everything and still win big.”

I haven’t followed that advice, because I quite like my jobs, and getting deep into a problem space is one of life’s pleasures. But, I do think it’s sound advice all the same.

It was written by the bro (LLM) app.

its both. i hopped mostly because i got to see how other places build things, different stack, different ideas about how to run a project, and you just dont get that staying at one company even a good one. internal promo really depends where you are. small startup, sure its easy to get promoted but youre basically doing the same job with a fancier title. big co you can move around and actually learn stuff but then you have to deal with the politics

This was never really true at most places, and even where it was sort of true, it's been false since 2023.

The ladder has collapsed. No more juniors to mentor and grow (in some cases no more US hiring period), and all of the carrots have been replaced with sticks. If you're lucky, the reward for doing good work and being nice is 'not being laid off', but the promo budget is gone and it's not like your boss gets a say in who's laid off so may the odds be ever in your favor.

> Do good work and be nice the rest follows

Nice little soundbite but for this to work your personal interpretation of "good work" and "be nice" needs to align with the people around you and the broader organisation.

In my experience, this only works at some companies. At others you have to play the promotion game (or have your manager play it for you).

I've seen people who don't follow this become emotional wrecks, which as a manager makes me feel like Dr. Phil.

I don’t think this is universal advice. I’m also a staff engineer and had to ask to get promoted to senior and staff level. Yes, you have to actually be doing good work and operating at that level as you say, but promotion culture has enormous variance. Sometimes you have to advocate for yourself. A mentor of mine was a VP of Engineering at mid-size companies for ~20 years and told me that he never got a promotion he didn’t ask for.

You got really lucky. That was my exact thought as well when I started my career and looking back that was so naive.

This, I dont do worry about TC or promos. If youre executing and people are happy then rewards and status usually follow. If not,you move along.

You're pretty lucky. Most people I know who've gotten to this point have had to think about it a lot.

You are confusing your rating in the profession, with your rating within your company...

I call this (well, in my head) the Sam Altman Fellow Kids style.

It's clearly a deliberate affectation that they're putting on because other words are properly capitalise (COVID, PIP, I, his own name, etc.). The author's other posts are properly formatted so I assume this was a a stylistic choice they made to illustrate their point on it being stream-of-consciousness.

I just find it more annoying on tweets because they've clearly fought the phone keyboard to override autocaps just to sound down with their fellow kids.

TL;DR: You got promoted or you wanted to get promoted. You decide you want to make a bigger project to show ambition, advance your career and whatnot. You embark on making some grand project, disappearing from view. This often leads to you getting stuck with something, falling behind and various negative effects like getting a PIP or becoming depressed.

His prescription to avoid this is to keep checking in and show some progress on something every day so you don't lose touch.

(My analysis: I don't think this is particularly a senior engineer problem, to me it just reads like ADHD-coded problems with time and interests)

I concluded long ago that anyone who writes without capitalizing the first letter of their sentences is not worth paying attention to, due to some combination of hubris, delusion, etc...

Combined with the inner monologue stream of consciousness style, and it is certain that this article is devoid of insight

Yeah should have put it through an LLM to clean it up.