flâneur

the senior engineer death spiral

sunilpai.dev · 959 words · saved by 1 readers

(a friend recently got a new job, a very senior role, very well paid, and pretty different from his previous gig. he was asking me how to do a 60 to 80-hour week, how to do well enough to get promoted, etc. and as we talked, I realised he was feeling a bit of imposter syndrome and really wanted to prove himself. I ended up giving him a bit of a monologue. this is more or less what I told him.) ok

(a friend recently got a new job, a very senior role, very well paid, and pretty different from his previous gig. he was asking me how to do a 60 to 80-hour week, how to do well enough to get promoted, etc. and as we talked, I realised he was feeling a bit of imposter syndrome and really wanted to prove himself. I ended up giving him a bit of a monologue. this is more or less what I told him.) okay, so this is the most common failure mode I’ve seen. I call it the senior engineer death spiral. it usually happens when an engineer goes into a new job, gets a promotion, or even just gets a big…

related reading