If you are unusually good at being an SDE 2, there's not really a way to leverage that into pay or recognition or harder projects. Until you get the promo you w

If you are unusually good at being an SDE 2, there's not really a way to leverage that into pay or recognition or harder projects. Until you get the promo you will just be doing the same borderline-menial work any SDE 2 can do, a fungible story points resource. Although it's great that the engineering IC ladder provides an alternative path to people management, there is no alternative path to being a professional meeting-talker. We do not allow unusually capable individuals to write code that the median engineer couldn't write (because then the median engineer definitely couldn't maintain it). Instead we ask them to supervise and direct the work of the median engineers. I actually think the best way to leverage mostly-solo intellectual work into business results and recognition might be data science. Models and analyses are allowed to be arbitrarily sophisticated and as long as the rest of the org understands the inputs/outputs/performance characteristics, they're content to treat the internals as black box. So data scientists can really go all out intellectually on their technical artifacts in a way that engineers can't.