Great article and thought provoking.

> and unlike your colleagues in management, you won’t spend all day in meetings.

The author will be surprised. In a bureaucratic company like Google, even an E6 can spend all their time having meetings and writing docs, to the point that they even get rusty at drawing boxes.

> If you want to reach this level, you’ll need to become a master of your chosen craft

One thing that worries me is that mastery also means specialization, and specialization is the most risky when there's a paradigm shift. My cope is to be specialized in a category. For instance, be a specialist in distributed systems instead of being a master of building Spring-boot services. That said, even that type of specialization is not immune to paradigm shift. Case in point, scaling out a service is really not that hard these days compared to 10 years ago.