Yesterday I’ve finished the first charpter of The Staff Engineer’s Path book and I would like to share some learnings:
1. Understanding the Staff Engineer role
Normally, senior engineers would have to follow/switch to management careers in order to keep growing.
This has changed with the Staff+ titles, which is a leadership, and not management role, which is still very technical.
By mentioning titles, the author highlights that they’re important… I gotta say: I’ve always hated titles.
For me they were more for people to promote theirselves and normally whatever title the person used to himself, that title was beyond his capabilities 👀.
But the author has some good points about this, mainly about expectations with that person and some kind of communication authority.
The Staff Engineer Three Pillars
The author describe the position in three pillars:
Big-picture thinking
Make technical decisions considering the whole organization instead of optimizing for individual teams.
Project execution
Makes initiatives get traction around the whole organization, making sure all the teams are able to move forward, helping with high level discussions and ensuring high quality.
Leveling up
Improve engineering standards across the organization and mentor engineers.
One callout that got me was the fact that the definition of the work of this role is ambiguous.
We, as engineers, we normally hate ambiguity. This used to cause too many problems for every engineer in the world, but now, this ambiguity is part of the job, and going further, is responsability of the Staff Engineer to understand exactly what to do.
This can be achieved by understanding the gaps of the organization and teams, also keeping all aligned with his manager.