Sunil Sadasivan read Sunil Pai’s “The Senior Engineer Death Spiral” a few times and came back with what he thinks sits underneath it. The best engineers he has worked with and managed arrived by different routes — some from customer support or services, some self-taught, some starting as designers or founders — and they shared one habit: they seemed to know what needed to be done.
That intuition is first-principles thinking, and in practice it looks like this:
- Ask why we are building something and what it does for the people using it
- Connect what is happening in the codebase to what is happening outside it
- Reach for the simplest version of the thing first, because it is usually enough
The hard part is not the asking, it is the setting aside:
- Put your experience, what you learned and what you currently believe is true in a box long enough to look at the problem again
- The failure mode is subtle — letting a past project or a familiar technical limitation pick the answer before the problem in front of you has been understood
- What comes back is usually more ways forward than expected
This is also how Pai’s momentum advice becomes practical. When you actually understand the goal, breaking the work down to the smallest thing you can accomplish is easy, and each small step tells you what to do next. First principles makes the loop feel natural rather than forced — “to me, that’s the new flow state.”
The takeaway is that judgement about what needs doing is the durable skill, and it compounds through small, fast learning loops. Sadasivan’s own version of that lesson came from the current shift in how software gets written: being willing to try something before assuming an old constraint still applies, and being honest about how much you do not know yet.