A really good senior engineer knows how to deliver a "quick hack" that is as well-documented and extensible as possible to avoid the most contagious tech debt.

A really good senior engineer knows how to deliver a "quick hack" that is as well-documented and extensible as possible to avoid the most contagious tech debt. There is a big difference between "hack in production" and "suboptimal, incremental solution in production". It's very easy to see the PMs etc. as the enemy, but they would have their own list of unfair gripes about engineers (e.g. as evidenced by this article, they seem to just want to be solitary geniuses left alone to work on things they aren't communicating about).