Why Doing More Keeps You Stuck<br>Shine Garg

Uncharted Path Breakthroughs

Personalized Coaching for Senior through Principal Engineers by a former Staff Engineer

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May 10 • 5 min read<br>Why Doing More Keeps You Stuck

~8 minute read | Read in browser ​

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?

The execution trap is the belief that the next level of growth will come from doing more of the work that got you here.

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.

Seniority is not just harder or more complex work. It is higher-stakes decision-making with broader consequences.

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.

Without this shift, you stay useful, busy, exhausted, and potentially resentful.

With this shift, you move from absorbing more work to creating more leverage,...