Contrary to conventional wisdom, a distinguished engineer advises senior engineers to delegate the most challenging, interesting work. They should instead take on necessary but unglamorous tasks, which builds immense credit and allows junior engineers to grow faster on high-impact problems.

A powerful piece of advice from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang encourages a cycle of impact. First, find a way to work on the most crucial projects ("get on the critical path"). Once your involvement becomes a bottleneck, your next job is to enable others and remove yourself ("get off it") to tackle the next challenge.

When senior engineers move away from hands-on coding, their understanding of the system becomes abstract. This leads to designs disconnected from reality, and they lose the trust of their team, who see them as out-of-touch architects without "skin in the game."

Don't just accept tasks from your boss. The initial request often reflects habit, not strategy. Your primary role is to pause and question if the proposed task truly solves the underlying business problem. This critical step prevents wasted effort and aligns work with actual goals, even when it means challenging a superior's directive.

The path to senior engineering levels is tied to the scope of your work's influence. Rather than explicitly seeking promotions, focus on projects with natural potential to grow from solving a team's problem to solving an organization's. The promotions will follow the impact.

When leaders demand high-fidelity prototypes too early, don't react defensively. Instead, frame your pushback around resource allocation and preventing waste. Use phrases like "I want to make sure I'm investing my energy appropriately" to align with leadership goals and steer the conversation back to core concepts.

Climbing the corporate ladder isn't always the ultimate goal. As professionals become more senior, they often move away from the hands-on, creative work they are passionate about. Leaders advise cherishing mid-career roles where you can be "in the weeds" of the actual work.

A critical career inflection point is moving from solely executing tasks (writing code) to influencing strategic decisions about what problems to solve. True value and impact come from being in the room where decisions are made, not just being the person who implements them.

Well-meaning professionals often take on "glue work" like improving onboarding or team culture. While valuable, this work often doesn't align with promotion criteria for senior roles. Audit your energy and focus on activities directly tied to the expectations of the role you want.