One of the reasons I find your story relevant is that advice-pieces like the OP kind of assume a ton of factors are in place that are actually often largely out of your control. It kind of paints this clear career trajectory path for engineers when I think the real world is infinitely more chaotic and random.

For one thing, just the existence of titles like Staff Engineer seems to have exploded in the last 5 years or so, at least from my perspective. My first few jobs out of school, it seemed like the progression was Junior, quickly to just "Software Engineer", eventually to Senior, and then nowhere particular, maybe management. I guess everyone in the industry can't help but steal Google's structure so these new levels of Staff, Senior Staff, Principal seem to have grown in popularity, but I think it's a more recent idea than not. I'm glad that standardized IC tracks are growing but it's hardly a given and the first factor is that your company offers them in the first place.

Still, it's incredibly unstandardized. Having insight into both companies, I know a place like Twitter, Staff Engineer is handed out more lightly than a place like Google and can be more reflective of political prowess than engineering impact.

A dynamic I've seen over and over again is orgs expect more senior engineers to work on more senior stuff but inevitably there is a massive amount of work that's individually low impact but collectively high impact to be done. In a dream world you'd figure out ways to automate it but that's not always feasible. So often times there are political wars fought over access to high impact projects which are perceived as necessary for promotion, while core, critical work that's less sexy but critical to good product gets left undone. If you want to know why a lot of tech companies that pay engineers massive amounts can launch shiny new things with ease but struggle with the basics, look no further.

One of Google's approach to this problem is to create a massively complicated ladder system of engineers, where you have employees that would be labeled Software Engineers at any other company by nature of their job responsibilities, but at Google are called something else and are specifically boxed out of more desirable projects by nature of their non-SWE title. And of course the contractor vs full-time distinction exists as well.

Another dynamic that can happen is that you have huge engineering impact but your company's product strategy fails so its all for nought. You can impact your company's chance of success but ultimately a company works in a given industry on certain problems and if for whatever reason the company's big picture strategy fails then that has a high chance of undermining and overshadowing your individual impact.

Or you were born in the wrong country or run into major health issues that block access to high impact work.

Overall, I just find advice like "work on high impact stuff, don't snack" to be oversimplified to the point of pandering when, there's so many variables outside the scope of your control as to whether you'll even get access to the opportunity to do high impact work in the first place. And while, of course there's almost certainly a correlation between strong engineering IC career trajectory and skill, work ethic, and good career decisions, there's also undoubtedly a massive amount of all sorts of bias that make me skeptical of a cookbook on how to get there.