The needs of a senior engineer vary by org and culture. It's only a "no true Scotsman" thing if we insist that there must be a single objective definition, but

The needs of a senior engineer vary by org and culture. It's only a "no true Scotsman" thing if we insist that there must be a single objective definition, but such a thing is a total myth. I've hired devs with the senior title that barely kept up with college interns. Similarly I've seen folks with 5+ years fail to meet expectations for baseline engineer with clear coaching and PIP over 6+ months, leave the company and land their first "senior engineer" a month after being fired. I've seen senior google engineers who failed to thrive in an open-source stack since they were used to being hand-held by Google's internal tooling and wealth of expertise they could turn to for any issue that was outside their immediate wheelhouse. Within a company it's possible to have some standard, and a lot of companies work very hard to make their levels as objective as possible, but even then it's incredibly difficult to reduce a large set of diverse individuals working on diverse projects with diverse skillsets down to a single number. All that said though, it doesn't matter how good your technical skills are, if you can't unblock yourself with cross-functional efforts, or figure out a way to optimize a bad situation, you will not be considered for the fast-track in most large engineering orgs. If the situation you find yourself in is truly intractable as you suggest, then the senior mentality would be to cut your losses and find a new situation.