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 project at work. or they ask for a big project because they think to themselves, “oh, if I work harder, do a bigger thing, then I will be rewarded with promotions and what have you,” right? like, that’s the move. and the thing they do is they tell themselves they need to almost cosplay being a more senior engineer than they are. they’re like, “oh, you know what, I’m going to try designing something way more ambitious.”

and what happens is they start disappearing for longer periods of time. like, for two, three weeks, you won’t hear anything from them. occasionally, during the standup, they’ll give what I call the positive update. “yeah, things are going well, you guys. I’ll have something to show you quite soon. if you have any questions, reach out.” and no one usually reaches out, but they won’t really have anything to show.

and in the back of their head, right, they’ve started the spiral already. they’re telling themselves, “oh my god, I haven’t really shipped anything in a while. what I need to do is work harder. I’ll just work hard enough. I’ll save this and no one will know.” like, “in the next week, I’ll do a whole month’s work. and no one will know.” they’ll start losing sleep, all of that. and it sucks, because bro, they start getting depressed, missing meals. their relationships suffer, both work and personal. and they just start spiraling, spiraling, and it ends up in worst-case scenarios. they burn out, they need to take a month off, they get PIP’d, they get fired, they quit their jobs because they think, “you know what, this is not salvageable.” and it really sucks.

and by the way, this isn’t something that I’ve noticed only with other people. this has happened to me. and it’s happened so many times that I now recognize it early enough to take a step back and fix it.

see, man, the bigger point here is that because of COVID and coding agents and remote work, things that have happened in the last five to ten years, right, you don’t really have the same structure of working next to someone and being given Jira tasks, etc. you have a lot more ownership, and you are unfortunately a little more siloed. so you never want to be in a situation where people don’t know what’s up with you. like, they shouldn’t be saying, “yeah, I don’t know what Sunil’s been doing,” and starting to get concerned, because they might only tell you when it’s too late. you want to be in a position where “Sunil doesn’t shut the fuck up about what he’s working on,” right? again, you don’t have to be obnoxious about it. you have to share your work.

I think in moments like this, the thing you need to do is actually a little counterintuitive. but you have to start from a position of assuming that everyone around you is operating in good faith, okay? like, they hired you for you. they didn’t hire you for who you think you’re going to be in six months. they like you for who you are right now, bro.

so the thing to do is actually to drop a level. not to try to be a higher-level engineer, but to almost drop a level and simply become the greatest teammate for a while. you’re still responsible for your work, you’re just trying to get moving again. you know, “I’m just here to help and support my teammates. I’m going to do bugs, the annoying things on somebody else’s plate or that no one has been able to get to. do grunt work, organizational stuff, write-ups. just things to help people out.”

and the reason you want to do this is you want to move away from an outcome-based mindset to momentum-based. like, you want to build a routine, because momentum is everything in this, and relationships are an even bigger thing in this. and by getting momentum going and fixing your relationships with other people, the thing you get is stamina. and that’s when you realize the real lesson, which is that big projects are not done with big efforts. it’s a big marathon, just slow, steady, incremental work. forget about a weekly basis, like a daily basis, an hourly basis, to the point that it’s muscle memory.

you’re in automatic mode. you wake up, you make yourself coffee, you get to work, and you just do the work. and then 30 days later, you look back and you see the immense volume of work that you’ve done just by doing a little bit every day. because the thing you’re going for is reliability, fixing your relationships. you want to take the burden off your teammates and your manager, because then, once you build that trust, they will give you bigger work. that’s the move here.

remember, you are in the reputation-building business, and software is actually downstream of that. godspeed and best of luck.