7 Unwritten Rules for High-Impact Engineering Careers
What they don’t teach you about thriving in technical organizations, but will define your success.
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When I joined the semiconductor industry 15 years ago, I was about as bright-eyed and bushy tailed as a fresh college graduate can be — excited to be a force to reckon with, eager to make a positive contribution, and ready for a steady climb up the career ladder.
As the years rolled by, I learned that things are a lot more complicated than that. For example, companies are not all that meritocratic as they claim to be. Or that proving you’re right today has consequences in the long term because people have feelings. And hold grudges. Most notably, it is often about who you know than what you do.
Time is the best teacher of the unwritten dynamics of chip design companies.
In this post, I’ll share seven lessons I’ve learned over the years and try to compress your learning curve if you’re new to the scene or even mid-career. I’ll explain the unspoken rules you won’t find in the onboarding manual or in any HR training session, plus suggestions to navigate each one without losing your competitive edge, or most importantly, your mind.
Let’s get into it! 👇🏽
Here is a table of contents:
Your value is the specific problems you can solve: Why problem solving makes you a more valuable asset, and how to find the right pain points.
The best projects are rarely assigned — you have to find them: Standing out in an engineering org involved doing more than you’re told; how to find unclaimed, high impact projects.
Know who can say yes (and when they will): Learn how decisions are made, who the key players are and what they care about.
Survive high-stakes design reviews: Stressful chip design reviews are part of the job and are often career defining moments; how to handle them properly.
Your visibility is your own responsibility: Your work won’t speak for itself, you need to speak up.
Cross boundaries without stepping on toes: Working across cross functional teams is necessary, but doing it right requires tact.
Spot CYA1 but don’t get sucked in: How to remain technical-minded and thorough while everyone else is playing CYA.
Read time: 12 mins
#1: Your value is the specific problems you can solve
While credentials may open doors, sustained success in technical fields comes from being known as the person who consistently unblocks bottlenecks or drives measurable outcomes. Becoming known as the go-to person for any specific problem often provides outsized returns in a company's environment. In my early career, I became known as the electromagnetic simulation expert in my company, and although my career path has evolved since then, it has since opened doors to opportunities both within the company and outside.
Newcomers often over-index on impressing with credentials or pedigree, not realizing that teams and managers are often overwhelmed and looking for those who take work off their plate or unlock progress. The problems you solve need not even be spectacular ones. Just focus on simple problems that result in efficiency improvements in the beginning.
How to navigate this:
Identify chronic pain points no one wants to own; especially ones that cost time or credibility. Create simple automation scripts, design tools, how-to guides or loom videos that help remove bottlenecks or allow others simplify their workflows.
Start collecting, tracking, and sharing outcomes. For example, a friend of mine who works for a Bay Area company created a dashboard that tracked resource utilization in his company. Turns out he saved the company millions in compute costs. Putting together something as simple as a wiki page with a collection of tools/resources you created can put you on the map within your organization.
#2: The best projects are rarely assigned — you have to find them
High-impact, career-defining projects are rarely handed to you directly, and finding one to work on and driving them to completion earns you trust and visibility. Most companies follow a “project assignment” model that feels neat on paper but ignores how real influence works. Aligning incentives between what you’re capable of and what the company needs provides the biggest rewards.
As Shaan Puri puts it in My First Million,
“Put a price tag on your projects. Find projects that will move the needle for the company.”
Finding high-ticket projects are not always easy, and requires that you interact with the right people across various teams in the organization which is something that we will discuss later in this post. Seeking out high impact projects requires initiative, the willingness to take on new challenges and the ability to work well with people.
How to navigate this:
Understand what product lines make the most money for the company, and what is next in line. Talk to key people in those teams to understand the biggest challenges they are facing.
Volunteer to explore, prototype, or document something nobody has time for. It teaches you something new, and your initiative is your ticket into working on those projects.
Frame your involvement carefully — say, “I started digging into this to understand it better” instead of “I’m taking over.” It keeps others from getting defensive.
#3: Know who can say yes (and when they will)
Companies talk a lot about data-driven decisions and structured processes. The truth is that behind most important technical or strategic decisions lies a shadow layer of influence, trust, and informal power dynamics. If you don’t understand who actually shapes priorities and how they do it, things will rarely go the way you want it to.
Early-career professionals are often taught to focus on technical excellence and “let the work speak for itself.” That’s only half the game. Roadmaps are shaped by a mix of technical merit, political capital, timing, and interpersonal trust — none of which are documented or discussed openly.
Understanding who can say yes and when they’re in a position to say yes is just as important as having a good idea. Whenever possible, find ways to prototype your idea and quantify the potential benefit. Understand who would benefit most from the potential upside, and informally pitch your idea to them. Once you have the right players on your side, things often go much more smoothly.
How to navigate this:
Understand informal alliances. Org charts are often suggestive of the chain of command, but nothing prevents you from deviating from them. Meet with engineers from other teams, understand their work and genuinely compliment the complexity they deal with every day. Develop mutual technical appreciation and ask questions that educate you. This way, when you actually propose an idea later, they’ll be more inclined to listen to you because they know that you’re not coming out of the blue.
Learn to frame things from others’ perspective. It’s easy to focus on what you want all the time, but the easier way to convince people is to understand where they are coming from. When pitching ideas, frame them in terms of team objectives, risk reduction, or roadmap acceleration, or any similar avenue that addresses what the other person cares about the most.
#4: Survive high-stakes design reviews
Someone once told me: “We’re here to be right, not nice.” That stuck with me.
In most large companies I have worked for, design reviews are serious business that often have dozens of experts gathered in a room with one singular purpose: To find every flaw in your design they can. Why is this necessary? Because chip designs cost millions to make, and if there is a chance of catching mistakes early, then it is by all means worth it in terms of both time and money.
Critique is often blunt and brutal. You might have spent days and sleepless nights working on a design choice you made, only to have it thwarted as useless right in front of your eyes. And in front of your peers. You might go into a design review thinking you’re done after this, only to realize that you’ve walked out with more to fix than you imagined.
Design reviews are where technical credibility is built or broken. The engineers who rise fastest are often the ones who can stay composed under fire, synthesize feedback, and come back with an even stronger revision.
How to navigate this: