202206112233 Staff-plus engineer

Staff engineering is a complex topic. As nebulous as it can be to get promoted to a 202206112236 Senior engineer role, it’s considerably harder to move into staff-plus roles. Whereas the definition varies a bit from company to company for senior engineering, the definition or even existence of staff-plus roles is completely irregular across the industry. Will Larson wrote an excellent book, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track¹ on what it means to be a staff-plus engineer. This structure note and its children mostly come from that resource, but also other citations where noted. That book is also (mostly) publicly available at staffeng.com.

[!important] Being a staff engineer is not just a role. It’s the intersection of the role, your behaviors, your impact, and the organization’s recognition of all those things.

The value of the title

• Bypass informal gauges of seniority (especially useful for underrepresented groups)
• Facilitating access to “the room”
• Increase current and career earnings
• Access to interesting work
• Different rather than better

Archetypes

• 202206112252 Staff tech-lead archetype
• 202206112255 Staff architect archetype
• 202206112259 Staff solver archetype
• 202206112300 Staff right-hand archetype

Responsibilities

This depends a lot on the role that the team or organization needs and what the engineer’s strengths are.

• Set technical direction — facilitate setting a tech vision and get people inspired and moving towards that vision. An omnipresent problem with this is that people always want “better” without knowing what that actually means. It’s their role to get to the bottom of that and do it.
• Mentorship and sponsorship — You're more likely to change your company's direction for the better by growing the engineers around you than through personal heroics.
• Providing engineering perspective — Being in the room for important decisions that affect product and engineering. Remember you're representing everyone's interests, not just your own.
• Exploration — When companies need to innovate and solve complex problems, they often turn to trusted individuals and let them loose on the problem. This ideally includes an element of trust from the company that if they fail, it's a reflection of the problem, not the team or individuals. This is some of the riskiest and most rewarding work that all companies do.
• Being glue — See Tanya Reilly's famous talk about this.²
• Writing code — Most write some, some write none, but none write tons.
• Slow but rewarding — Keeping at a problem that spans weeks, months, years. Persevere.

Threads and skills

• Comfort solving and scoping complex tasks and 202208131327 System design.
• Coordinating teams and unblocking them.
• Carry context and share it widely.
• Generate vision and purpose, communicate it effectively and widely, and inspire others to work towards it (202203231647 Leading from vision).
• Delegate widely to grow and increase others’ impact.
• 202207310947 Staff engineer promotion packet

Operating effectively at the staff-plus level

• 202206112310 Work on what matters
• Write engineering strategy — Get your tech to support your business objectives.
• Curate technical quality — Maintain and uphold quality standards (202204021218 Architecture Decision Records).
• Stay aligned with authority — Be effective by staying aligned with your proxied authority from management.
• To lead, you have to follow — Blend your vision with that of your peers and juniors (202208211404 Learning to follow and learning to lead).
• Learn to never be wrong — Shift towards communication, relationships, and understanding instead of being right.
• Create space for others — Your teams should be stronger than your individual contributions.
• Build a network of peers — Vet your ideas, decisions, and get feedback.
• Present to executives — Be comfortable and effective at getting executive sponsorship and alignment.

Many of these can be achieved by having 202211011039 Effective staff engineering meetings.