The senior engineer death spiral: why working harder can backfire

Engineer Sunil Pai has published a post describing a career trap he calls "the senior engineer death spiral". Dated 19 September 2026, it is written as advice to a friend who had just taken a very senior, well-paid role and asked how to work 60 to 80 hours a week to earn a promotion.

How the spiral starts

Pai says the trap usually closes when an engineer joins a new company, gets a promotion, or takes on a large project. They convince themselves that harder work and bigger things will be rewarded, and start "cosplaying" a more senior engineer than they are, designing something far more ambitious than the task requires.

Then they disappear. For two or three weeks colleagues hear nothing except what Pai calls the positive update at standup: things are going well, something will be shown soon, anyone with questions should reach out. Usually nobody does, and nothing appears.

What hiding costs

Outside it is silent, but the spiral is already turning. The engineer tells themselves they have shipped nothing in a while and simply need to work harder, that a month of work can be squeezed into a week without anyone noticing. Sleep and meals are skipped, mood falls, and both professional and personal relationships suffer. Pai lists the worst endings plainly: burnout, a month off, a performance improvement plan, dismissal, or quitting because the situation no longer looks salvageable.

It is not only something he has watched in others: it has happened to him often enough that he now recognises the signs early and steps back.

Why remote work makes it worse

Part of the cause, he argues, lies in the past five to ten years: the pandemic, coding agents and remote work dismantled the old structure of sitting next to a colleague and being handed tickets. Engineers carry more ownership and are more isolated, so being invisible is a genuine risk. Teammates should always know what you are working on; share the work, without being obnoxious about it.

A counterintuitive fix: drop a level

His advice is to assume everyone around you acts in good faith, and to remember you were hired for who you are today, not for who you hope to be in six months. Instead of performing at a higher level, deliberately drop a level and become the best possible teammate for a while: take bugs, the annoying items on someone else's plate, unglamorous work nobody has reached, documentation and organisation.

The aim is to move from an outcome-based mindset to a momentum-based one. A daily routine builds momentum, and repairing relationships builds stamina. Big projects, he concludes, are not delivered by big efforts but by slow, steady, incremental work repeated daily until it becomes muscle memory. Software, in his phrasing, is downstream of reputation.