This is hardly surprising. Think about Staff+ engineers: their work is a lot like commanding AI. Most climb the corporate ladder through hard work, excellent engineering skills, soft skills, and a bit of luck. But as their companies grow, they gradually spend less time coding, debugging, or doing deep design.
Instead, they act more like highly technical product managers. They help VPs plan and write high-level product requirements sprinkled with technical terms. They draw boxes on whiteboards and create pretty slides. They write polished documents that keep their leadership happy, and they are either in meetings or on their way to the next one. When they have a technical idea, they dispatch a team to test it out.
Naturally, they still feel deeply technical, until the day they have to resolve a production issue, pass a technical interview, or write extensive code. That is when they realize their skills have grown rusty.
I point this out not to criticize, but to highlight a genuine career challenge. As an engineer, I would rather hone my technical skills. Yet, if you want to climb the corporate ladder, you have to take on more organizational work. The only solution I can think of is to become more like a researcher or a professor. Over the years, good professors spend less time writing papers or deriving formulas. However, their insights are so deep that they still produce amazing results by advising PhD students. But that path is much easier said than done.
Instead, they act more like highly technical product managers. They help VPs plan and write high-level product requirements sprinkled with technical terms. They draw boxes on whiteboards and create pretty slides. They write polished documents that keep their leadership happy, and they are either in meetings or on their way to the next one. When they have a technical idea, they dispatch a team to test it out.
Naturally, they still feel deeply technical, until the day they have to resolve a production issue, pass a technical interview, or write extensive code. That is when they realize their skills have grown rusty.
I point this out not to criticize, but to highlight a genuine career challenge. As an engineer, I would rather hone my technical skills. Yet, if you want to climb the corporate ladder, you have to take on more organizational work. The only solution I can think of is to become more like a researcher or a professor. Over the years, good professors spend less time writing papers or deriving formulas. However, their insights are so deep that they still produce amazing results by advising PhD students. But that path is much easier said than done.