[ZephyrBlu]

How much of that is optimizing for appearance/behaviour (Either intentionally or unintentionally) and other people wrongly pattern-matching though?

When I joined a big tech company the hardest part of ramping up was learning how to operate in that environment. There are a lot of implicit behaviours a "good" engineer is supposed to that you mostly have to figure out by yourself. Some of them are genuinely useful, but I think a lot are basically a kind of filter: https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1555077502803947520.

From what I've seen, the main skill for promotion in my company isn't engineering a well designed system, it's being visible and finding/creating the right projects.

I completely believe that someone could figure out how to behave like a higher level engineer and even succeed in their team, then get put in a different environment and completely flounder because they were mostly just copying behaviours that worked in their current environment, not learning fundamentals.

I'm also curious, vaguely what archetype was this Staff engineer: https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-archetypes.

[rpandey1234]

I'd say they were somewhere between the Tech Lead and Solver archetype in the article you linked. BTW, we're big fans of staffeng, lots of good content there! One of the signs of promotion is that your behavior leads to having more impact (not just execution), so after a ramp-up period, I'd expect someone very senior to get back to that level of impact in a different team or even different domain.

You're right there is some element of pattern-matching that happens for a higher level engineer, but in my experience this has to be backed up with actually earning the trust of the broader team, and that requires strong fundamentals.