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By Shine Garg

Staff+ Career Coach | Former Staff Engineer

Thank you for the thoughtful engagement with the first edition of this newsletter. Within the first 24 hours, 60% of you opened it. I’m glad the topic resonated. To respect your time, let’s get right into today’s topic.

In the first edition, we looked at a pattern many strong engineers know well: when their career feels stuck, they often respond by taking on more work and working harder.

In this edition, I want to share why doing more work often does not create more career growth.

We’ll look at what execution trap is, why it stops working as your scope grows, and why strong engineers stay caught in it longer than they realize.

What is the execution trap?

This can happen at any level. Your tactical work simply changes shape as your role grows.

In practice, this looks like increasing your output while your growth stalls because the work no longer increases your leverage.

We saw in the first edition why many engineers carry this belief: Finishing tickets, writing reliable code, and reducing technical risk got them promoted from entry level to Senior.

But growth beyond Senior requires leverage, which rarely comes from more execution alone.

Why seniority changes the kind of value you create

A junior engineer may decide how to implement a piece of code within a small scope.

A CTO may decide whether to invest in a platform migration, slow down feature work to address reliability, reorganize teams, or make a multi-year technical bet.

Both require technical judgment. But they carry very different levels of ambiguity, risk, and organizational consequence.

Most engineers grow through the space between those two points. As seniority increases, the stakes of the decisions you shape increase too.

In the last edition, I wrote that seniority requires understanding the playing field: organizational dynamics, business priorities, and second-order effects. This understanding is critical to creating leverage.

Here’s one of the clearest ways to understand seniority.

Seen through this lens, it becomes clear why doing more work can quietly stop creating career growth.

If the problem has already been selected, the success criteria defined, and the ticket written, many high-leverage decisions have already happened.

You may still be doing excellent work, but you are operating downstream from the conversations that determine what matters, which tradeoffs are acceptable, who needs to be aligned, and how the work creates a durable impact.

And there is a ceiling to personal output. Even with AI, there is only so much code you can write, project load you can carry, and context-switching you can absorb before the cost of tactical execution becomes real.

From tactical executor to force multiplier

At Senior+ levels, growth increasingly comes from becoming a force multiplier: improving the direction, quality, alignment, and velocity of work beyond your own hands.

That may mean clarifying a vague problem so the team stops thrashing, making tradeoffs visible so leaders can make a better decision, or mentoring others so the team no longer depends on you for every answer.

This is engineering work at a higher level of leverage. And as we saw in the first edition, leverage does not travel far without influence—the context, relationships, and advocacy that help your work shape decisions beyond your immediate team.

But if your plate is always full of execution, you have less room to practice the skills that create leverage: prioritization, stakeholder alignment, communication, conflict resolution, delegation, and risk management. Over time, that opportunity cost compounds.

In the age of AI, these skills will only become more important because they determine which problems are worth solving, how judgment is applied, and whether the work creates real organizational value.

These are not extra skills layered on top of “real engineering.” They are how ambiguous ideas become real organizational impact.

The solution is not to stop executing. It is to execute closer to the decisions that make the work important.

I learned this the hard way.

The tough love I needed

When I first reached Staff, I was still trying to prove that I deserved the role by accepting more work and responsibility.

Then my coach gave me the tough love I needed:

That framing stayed with me. Staff-level growth required better discernment: which work mattered, which work I should shape, and which work I needed to help others own.

So, if the execution trap is so costly, why do strong engineers stay in it?

Why strong engineers stay in the execution trap

The execution trap is not just a tactical problem; it’s also emotional.

Execution feels like progress

Execution gives you visible motion. Something closes, ships, improves, or gets unblocked. That can feel productive, even when you are only optimizing for what is directly in front of you.

Telltale signs:

• “This is the most urgent thing right now.”
• “Once I clear this backlog, I’ll think more strategically.”
• “I don’t have time to zoom out yet.”

Execution protects identity

For many engineers, complex technical work feels like the clearest proof of value.

Higher-order skills like delegation and conflict resolution can feel like stepping away from “real engineering,” even when they are essential to engineering impact at scale.

Telltale signs:

• “I just want to do real engineering work.”
• “Writing docs is a waste of time. I’ll just code.”
• “Talking to people is not work.”

Execution avoids exposure

I once coached a Staff engineer who was angry that his manager wanted him to write more documents to share his thinking.

As we unpacked it, he realized writing exposed his judgment before the outcome was proven, and that felt vulnerable. Plus, writing was not his strong suit yet.

A telltale sign:

• “People will nitpick this.”

Execution preserves control

For many strong engineers, a high quality bar can quietly turn into resistance to delegation.

Telltale signs:

• “If I don’t do it, it won’t be done right.”
• “It will take longer to explain than to do it myself.”
• “What if they do it better? Then I’ll lose my reputation.”
• “What if delegating makes my own contribution less visible?”

These fears are human. But when they go unexamined, they pull you deeper into the same pattern.

This is the stuck tactical executor spiral.

Changing jobs does not always address the problem. Sometimes the environment really is the constraint. But a new role does not automatically change your operating pattern.

The way out of the execution trap is not to stop executing. It is to stop using execution as your only way to prove your value.

If you recognize yourself in this spiral, the companion guide can help you diagnose what is keeping you there and identify practical ways to move toward higher-leverage work.

Put This Into Action

Look at your current work and ask:

• Which work am I doing because it creates leverage?
• Which work am I doing because it makes me feel useful, safe, or in control?
• If I changed jobs tomorrow, which working pattern would I likely bring with me?

You do not need to change everything at once. Start by noticing where the spiral pulls you in.

If you recognize yourself in this spiral, feel free to reply and tell me where it feels hardest to interrupt.

If you’re an engineering leader, you might also ask: where are your strongest engineers stuck in this spiral, and what would help them move closer to higher-leverage decisions?

How Can I Help?

If this edition resonated, I help engineers navigate these exact challenges through 1:1 coaching and a live course on behavioral interviews.

• ​Apply for personalized coaching​
• Join the waitlist for Master the Behavioral Interview as a Senior Engineer to be notified when the next cohort opens.

If you’d like more essays like this, you can read past editions here.

You’re receiving this email because we connected in some way: through coaching, a discovery or complimentary call, a 1:1 conversation, a community, a talk, or resources and workshops I’ve shared on behavioral interviews, career growth, and technical leadership. You can unsubscribe at any time.