Why Senior Data Engineers Lose Their Velocity (Even When Their Skills Improve)
The hidden shift from building systems to navigating the people around them.
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Deyan looked at me from across his desk the way only a founder can, half amused, half worried about payroll. He asked how long the new video feature would take. I’d done my homework. I said two weeks.
He didn’t even blink. “So, one month”.
Then he added the line that stuck with me for years: “You haven’t hit any of your estimates in a while”.
I remember feeling this mix of embarrassment and defensiveness. In my head I wanted to argue. I wasn’t slow. I was helping everyone else ship their work. I was reviewing pull requests, answering questions, jumping into bugs I didn’t own, and running little rescue missions nobody ever writes down on a sprint board.
But it didn’t matter. My output looked slow from the outside. The code didn’t care about my good intentions.
That was the first moment I realised something was off. Not with how senior engineers actually work once people start depending on them. I lost the conditions required to use it.
The Senior IC Paradox
If you’ve been in tech long enough, you’ve felt this shift even if nobody named it for you. You start your career with huge blocks of uninterrupted time. Hours where you can disappear into a problem, come up for air, and actually see the impact of your effort on the screen.
Then you get good.
People trust you. They rely on you. They want your judgment because you’ve seen things go sideways before.
Suddenly you’re the person who knows the historical reason behind some cursed data flow. You’re the one teammates ping when a task “looks simple but feels weird”. You’re the one product wants a sanity check from before they commit to an idea.
And here’s the paradox nobody writes in the job description:
The more experience you gain, the less time you get to use it.
Your context grows. Your interruptions grow faster. Your ownership expands. Your focus evaporates.
A junior engineer gets to spend 80–90+% of their week actually building things. You’re lucky if you get 20–30%, and that’s on a quiet week when nobody’s Slack notifications are melting.
You didn’t ask for this, but it becomes your reality.
Your brain shifts from maker mode to maintainer of everyone else’s momentum. Your value increases, but your visible output shrinks.
And if you don’t understand that shift, you start thinking something’s wrong with you. You start wondering why your velocity feels lower even though your skills are sharper than ever.
Nothing’s wrong with you. You live the senior IC paradox.
Why Senior Engineers Lose Velocity
If you’ve ever stared at your week and wondered why everything feels harder than it used to, here’s the truth most people avoid saying out loud: your skills didn’t decay, but your environment did.
You didn’t suddenly forget how to break down a feature.
You didn’t lose the ability to write clean code.
You didn’t secretly become bad at estimating.
What you lost was conditions.
As you get more senior, your job shifts from doing the work to navigating the work. Think of the invisible stuff that never shows up on a roadmap but dictates every deadline you touch.
You start spending more time on things like:
Aligning stakeholders who see the problem differently.
Sequencing priorities so nobody trips over each other.
Unblocking teammates who got handed half-baked requirements.
Translating vague expectations into something you can actually deliver.
Making trade-offs because leadership wants everything yesterday.
None of this feels like “real engineering”, but it controls whether anything ships.
And here’s the punchline you’ve probably already felt in your chest:
The better you get, the more people want a piece of your brain.
Every “can you take a look?” burns a chunk of your day. Every context switch leaves your mental state scattered across three Slack threads and a half-written function.
You lose velocity because your calendar turns into a shared resource the moment people realize you know what you are doing.
The Myth of “More Complexity”
If you’re like most engineers, you grew up believing seniority meant one thing: you’d take on harder tasks. Bigger systems, tougher problems, more ambitious work. More complexity. More impact.
But here’s the plot twist nobody prepares you for: seniority has very little to do with doing “more.” It’s almost entirely about doing less*,* but seeing more.
Instead of deep-diving into juicy technical puzzles, you start carrying the overhead of context. You become the person who remembers why a model was designed the way it was three product managers ago. You’re the one who can predict which dependency will break if someone makes a “small” change.
But that’s not complexity. It’s breadth disguised as expertise.
It’s also why the work you get handed starts feeling lighter and less technical. Less hands-on. Less of the thing that made you fall in love with engineering in the first place.
The truth is simple:
Seniority isn’t a big technical promotion, but a slow drift into a different job.
In good companies, you feel the shift happening early. Someone warns you. Someone mentors you. You get pulled into alignment meetings gradually so you can learn the pattern.
In other companies, they flip the switch overnight.
One day you’re shipping features. The next, you’re the team’s historian, translator, therapist, and decision buffer.
And suddenly you’re wondering why your velocity feels like it fell off a cliff when all you wanted was to grow.
The System I Use to Keep My Velocity
If you want to survive as a senior IC (individual contributor/non-manager) without drowning in everyone else’s needs, you need one thing you’ve probably never built for yourself: a personal operating system.
Not a productivity hack or calendar trick. I mean an actual system for controlling how work flows through you.
Here’s the version I use today. Steal what you like. Adapt what you need. Just don’t run senior work on a junior operating model, because it’ll eat you alive.