Many people (including this comment) severely underestimate the sheer volume of information processed everyday by those staff level engineers in big techs.
Imagine that each day you need to review 1~2 design docs, read and reply tens of mails, attend at least 3 meetings and make non-negligible engineering decisions each, keep the lights on, manage and mentor some junior engineers. And write some code and design docs for your own projects upon all the crazy stacks of technical and procedural complexity.
Time is limited resource, so you cannot really have enough time to understand everything needed as scopes expand. You will eventually need to embrace ambiguities and uncertainties stemming from the complexity. And this needs more than just willingness and patience. Perhaps having some level of smartness can help, but this alone might not be sufficient though.
Imagine that each day you need to review 1~2 design docs, read and reply tens of mails, attend at least 3 meetings and make non-negligible engineering decisions each, keep the lights on, manage and mentor some junior engineers. And write some code and design docs for your own projects upon all the crazy stacks of technical and procedural complexity.
Time is limited resource, so you cannot really have enough time to understand everything needed as scopes expand. You will eventually need to embrace ambiguities and uncertainties stemming from the complexity. And this needs more than just willingness and patience. Perhaps having some level of smartness can help, but this alone might not be sufficient though.