In an earlier tweet, I recommended working on the hardest problem you can to gain respect, and then use that respect to get out of the “junior engineer” stage. But this doesn’t apply only to juniors. In my own work life: 1 - I became the youngest engineering manager at Yahoo by trying to solve real-time AI / AR back in 2017. We have SDKs for that nowadays, but back then it required significant optimizations due to limited hardware. I didn’t say “promote me, and I’ll solve it.” They basically begged me to manage more people after I showed I could deal with a problem they thought wasn’t solvable. 2 - RareSkills started to be taken very seriously after I cracked ZK education. Back in 2023, I could count on one hand the number of resources that made a serious (though incomplete) attempt to teach someone how to actually code a prover and verifier. Nowadays, there are a lot of ZK materials, but most of them are heavily inspired by the ZK book. It may seem obvious to study Sets, then Groups, then Fields, then Homomorphisms, then pairings, nowadays, but not even the moon math manual had such a clear knowledge graph (more than one Math PhD told me it was hard to understand, but I don’t mean this as an insult to the authors, putting all that material together is no small feat). It was ferociously hard to find a new way to explain ZK besides the useless “polynomial commitment -> linear PCP -> non-interactive proof” explanation that people didn’t actually understand anyway. —— When you are more advanced in your career, the temptation may be to just focus on what is convenient or profitable in the short term. I spent years dogged with the feeling that I should just get a high-paying technical job instead of writing blogs people read for free. But consider this: doing hard things can create more profit opportunities in the long run. For example, technical writers are normally paid very little, but we managed to turn it into a profitable business (and pay our writers 2-3x what they would earn elsewhere) simply because we proved we could do something hard in the field of technical writing. Do not underestimate the power of reputation and respect and do not try to shortcut your way there. The reason accomplishments gain you respect is not because of the accomplishment itself, but because of the implied effort you put in on the way there.