[kstrauser]

My friend explained it this way: up through senior, you’re concentrating on making yourself and later your team more efficient. As you transition through to staff/principal, you’re working to make your department and whole company more efficient. Sometimes that means unblocking someone so their work can continue. Other times that means getting two teams together to work out their differences. Even if you’re not getting your hands dirty as often, you’re making a much bigger difference than you would if you were spending all day looking at code.

Reframing it that way made a huge difference for me. The things I’d thought of as chores, or necessary evils, are really my opportunity to use the knowledge I’ve accumulated to make whole teams of people work better. That’s pretty cool.