Engineering cultures like to imagine that they are meritocracies, so ideas supposedly compete on their merits. Cynics might argue, on the other hand, that it's all about corporate politics. Neither of these positions is correct, although both merit and politics play a role.
The ravine of the senior engineer
For your entire career, you've overcome new technical challenges, pressing through modest ravines associated with learning a new programming paradigm or working at a different level of the stack. And now you're an accomplished engineer, a model for others, and you want to know how to get promoted to "staff" or whatever the next level on the engineering ladder is. But you've run into some problems.