Sunil Pai writes to a friend who just took a very senior, very well-paid job at a new company and asked how to work 60-to-80-hour weeks to earn a promotion. His answer: that instinct is the setup for what he calls the senior engineer death spiral. He has run it himself, more than once, which is how he now catches it early.

The pattern, in order:

  • You decide you need to cosplay a level above where you are, and design something more ambitious than the work requires.
  • You go quiet. Two or three weeks with nothing to show.
  • Standup gets the “positive update”: things are going well, I’ll have something soon, reach out if you have questions. Nobody reaches out.
  • Privately the arithmetic turns punitive — “I haven’t shipped, so I’ll do a month’s work in one week and no one will know.”
  • Sleep, meals and both work and personal relationships go first. The exits are a month off, a PIP, a firing, or quitting because it looks unsalvageable.

Why it bites harder now: remote work, COVID-era habits and coding agents stripped out the old structure of sitting next to someone who hands you a queue of tickets. Engineers get more ownership and less visibility at the same time, so silence is easier to sustain and more expensive when it finally breaks.

The fix is deliberately unambitious:

  • Assume everyone around you acts in good faith. They hired you for who you are today, not for who you think you should be in six months.
  • Drop a level instead of climbing one. Spend a while being the best teammate available — bugs, the annoying things nobody wants, write-ups, organizational work.
  • Switch from an outcome mindset to a momentum one. The goal is a routine, not a heroics window.
  • Big projects are not built with big efforts. They are daily and hourly increments until the work is muscle memory.
  • Reliability and repaired relationships are the mechanism, not the byproduct. Take the burden off your team and the bigger work gets assigned to you later.

The line worth keeping: you want to be the person who never shuts up about what they are working on — not obnoxious about it, just visible. Silence is what turns a slow start into a spiral. You are in the reputation-building business, and the software is downstream of that.