31–40 of 201 posts
Lines are straight. Staffs are are uneven. Lines help you walk by you looking at them. Staff help you walk by you holding them.
Imma argue with this, as a developer for a bigger non-tech company (and a few small ones)
I've worked for in-house agencies and the pattern is completely different. In-house, every dictat in the software comes from the top down as a fully-formed thought. Whereas being an independent contractor gives you way more creative control over how software turns out. Instead of having to accept some wireframe drawn up by another arm of the company, you get to interrogate the people who will actually be using the software and find out what they need. You have to understand the business logic more than you would if you just accepted it as a programming job alone, and therefore you become more of a design branch than just a coding branch. And I say branch because you are still an integral part of the company, but instead of telling you what to do, they come to you for advice on how to accomplish their aims.
Author here. Working at a tech company as a developer vs working at a non-tech company are very different. These two types of roles were called line vs staff when I took a business school class and I think the differences between these two types of roles have a big impact on what the job is like, even if doing the same type of work. It's a bit confusing because it overlaps with 'staff software engineer' term. I recal…
I had not heard the "Staff" designation before Google popularized it. I believe in early 2000s, the popular job prefixes were "Senior" and "Principal". The "Staff" prefix always confused me and gave me a feeling that if layoff ever came "Staff" will be protected while everyone else was expendable. I don't think Google adopted this prefix in the sense it was popular in militery.
Author here. Working at a tech company as a developer vs working at a non-tech company are very different. These two types of roles were called line vs staff when I took a business school class and I think the differences between these two types of roles have a big impact on what the job is like, even if doing the same type of work. It's a bit confusing because it overlaps with 'staff software engineer' term. I recal…
A problem I deal with personally is growing into "Staff" style work. I'd love to have bigger, wider impacts on a more strategic level, but I'm so damn good at getting into line work and doing a good job of it. (I also understand myself well enough to know that I like stabbing away at a technical problem way more than I like a VP or C-level planning meeting.) I also feel like I've gotten so good at doing "line" style work that there doesn't seem to be org pressure to promote me. My perception is that I'm considered too good on the "line"; I'd be a loss to the org to move up a notch. This could also mean that I'm actually not as good as I think I am, or can't see the forest for the trees. It could also be a sign of what a brutal struggle promotion is for "line" style workers. (More competition, less routes up the ladder.)
Is there a path to grow there, or am I just doomed to be a Principal Engineer? (Not the worst fate, "doomed" is probably too strong a word there lol)
Author here. Working at a tech company as a developer vs working at a non-tech company are very different. These two types of roles were called line vs staff when I took a business school class and I think the differences between these two types of roles have a big impact on what the job is like, even if doing the same type of work. It's a bit confusing because it overlaps with 'staff software engineer' term. I recal…
Reminds me of C Sharp developers until I joined a purely MS stack using company. Also a silent majority in my opinion.
Author here. Working at a tech company as a developer vs working at a non-tech company are very different. These two types of roles were called line vs staff when I took a business school class and I think the differences between these two types of roles have a big impact on what the job is like, even if doing the same type of work. It's a bit confusing because it overlaps with 'staff software engineer' term. I recal…
The thing is that every non-tech company is now in some sense in the tech industry, whether they mean to be or not; a large part of their business is done online. As opposed to companies that specialize in building tech for other companies, many of them have nickel-and-dimed their way into their own hardware/software infrastructure and the maintenance of that has become crucial to their normal operations, to the point where instead of business logic dictating changes to it, it frequently dictates changes to their business logic. That puts independent devs for those companies in a kind of catbird seat to determine which stacks and which infrastructure are going to drive the next round of growth. Some people (like my friend who's a salesman for Salesforce) call this "technical debt", but really it's bootstrapping and the better and cheaper you can do it through indy devs, the better your bottom line.
So it's quite different than the normal software world, but it's neither what you're calling a staff position nor is it actually a line position.