Similar when you climb up the technical path as well, beyond staff engineer. It gets lonely, not many peers, not part of a team, you have to be careful about what you say and to whom as your words carry a lot of significance.
At staff you are still spending a lot of your time working with people. You are working on technical problems but you should be teaching them how to do it.
If you want to be heads down working on code all day stick to senior engineer.
If you want to be heads down working on code all day stick to senior engineer.