The skills that got you promoted won't get you promoted again

Every promotion up to senior engineer rewards the same thing: being the person who ships the hardest tickets fastest. The promotion after that rewards something almost opposite — how much better the people around you get because you exist. Keep optimizing for individual output past that point, and you'll plateau exactly where the skill that used to work stops being the bottleneck.

What changes when you get promoted past senior engineer?

A staff-level (or engineering-manager-level) promotion case is rarely "I wrote more code than anyone." It's "three people on my team can now do something they couldn't do a year ago because of how I worked with them," or "a decision I made saved the team from a rebuild." The evidence shifts from commits to outcomes you didn't personally type.

Why is staying the best individual contributor a trap?

Being the person everyone routes hard problems to feels like leverage, but it's often the opposite — it means the team's capability is bottlenecked on you personally being available. If you're still the only one who can debug the trickiest part of the system after two years, that's not job security, that's a single point of failure with your name on it.

What should you practice instead?

Deliberately take the harder, slower path of explaining your reasoning instead of just fixing something yourself, reviewing someone else's attempt at the hard problem instead of doing it for them, and writing down the tribal knowledge in your head so it stops being tribal. It feels less productive in the moment. It's the actual job at the next level.