Sometimes to look like a genius you have to look incompetent for a bit. In a place operating with SCRUM you're often expected to be shipping things every sprin

Sometimes to look like a genius you have to look incompetent for a bit. In a place operating with SCRUM you're often expected to be shipping things every sprint, and sometimes with a large and important piece of work the experimentation, and the building of the thing, doesn't fit in a sprint, and if you tried to ship incrementally you'd just be shipping junk. So you're going to end up giving some standup updates that do not inspire confidence for a bit. "I tried this thing, didn't work out", "still working on X, tried another thing", etc. It's possible at the end of it you figure it out, and the result justifies the time investment. The spiral is friction with a system that disincentivizes taking on ambitious goals. I wouldn't just blame the engineer for not shipping smaller things, being less ambitious, talking more instead of working, I'd blame the company culture for disincentivizing deep work and ambitious goals. Obviously there's a limit to this. You do need to ship something useful eventually. It's possible you spend extra time and still fail to accomplish the thing you wanted. It might be damaging to your reputation. You win some you lose some. With AI there's less time between having the idea to do something or try something, and it being done or ruled out, so I see this being less of an issue now. The main barrier is knowing what to do and describing it.