I just started to read the book The Staff Engineer’s Path from, Tanya Reilly, which, as the name suggests, discuss about “Staff Engineer”
Obviously I have much more to learn (still on the first charpter) but I finally understood what the industry calls as “Staff Engineer”: it’s basically a Tech Lead focused more in the technical track.
This make sense ’cause very often the term “Tech Lead” is misunderstood as it is a quite vague: the words Tech and Lead together may lead to one (or all) of the following understandings:
- Someone who is very experienced in hard skills and can lead technical discussions and make decisions;
- Someone who is very experienced technically and now is able to manage/lead people in minor positions;
As an engineer applying to “Tech Lead” jobs I can surely say: this mix of (fair) understandings leads to confusion and frustations for both recruiters and candidate (me).
So far in the book I didn’t see the term Tech Lead, maybe this is an old/outdated term, or maybe just got unused due to this ambiguous understandings.
Based on the book, the two understandings are now separated into two different positions:
- Someone who is very experienced in hard skills and can lead technical discussions and make decisions: Staff+ Engineer;
- Someone who is very experienced technically and now is able to manage/lead people in minor positions: Manager;
You may have noticed the
+sign appended to the “Staff” word, this means any position above Staff Engineer, such as Senior Staff Engineer or Principal Engineer, for example.
That been said, I would say I prefer this segregation than having the Tech Lead position in a single one.
Now, both parts (recruiters, candidates, companines and the community as whole) are able to speak in the same language and have more clearer definitions and expectations for each position (even though it still have space for discussions under each position about it’s definitions and expectations, which may vary from company to company).
I think it would be a quite hard to the exact same definition for a position for every company in the world, but having at least this high-level one is very good (and way better than simply Tech Lead).