Staff engineer’s path

Introduction

Once you become a senior of developer, there are basically two paths for you to follow. One is being a manager, which means having people that we will respond to you and the other one is staff engineering. Unfortunately, staff engineering is not a well defined career which means that many companies don’t know what to expect from them and how to evaluate them. This can cause a lot of issues especially for the new staff engineers since they don’t know if they’re doing a good job or if they are doing it at all.

3 pillars

There are basically three pillars that are staff engineer should focus on the first one is the big picture. It should always look for the overview of this project not only thinking about the details, but thinking about how the company we were overtime how to replace system and so on, the second one is the execution the topic is related to how to tackle projects and how to deal with other developers how to use your social capital and how to keep things moving forward and the third one is leveling up which means not only improving your technical skills, but also your person skills and improving the skills of other developers around you

The big picture

There is a concept called the local Maxima which means that if someone is not paying attention to the big picture you can take a decision. That’s the best one for the involved team but it’s worse for the whole company for example you are implementing a solution that we will be super quick to implement for your team, but the other teams that need to integrate with it will need several weeks to make it work, that’s why necessary. It helps to avoid local maxima

What is required from my job?

Reporting high

You need to report to people that are high in the company. This will allow you to have more visibility and support

Getting in the room

Informal decisions

Making a Big picture

Vision vs Strateg