The other kind of staff software engineer

For me the more useful distinction has been: how close are you to the customer? If you never interact with them, not even indirectly through a team manager directly interacting with them, you're probably working more in a "staff" role under this categorization regardless of who is actually using the thing you're building. Admittedly this has problems -- you have to figure out who the customer is, for one, but it's legitimate for them to be either internal or external, paying or not. And for many companies (perhaps especially "tech companies" and tech startups) it often ends up being both via dogfeeding. I think the presence/absence of the customer in short feedback loops alongside those actually making and maintaining things dominates the distinction of whether it's staff or line. Focusing this way does help avoid the sometimes difficult distinctions of what makes a company tech or non-tech and how reasonable people can disagree over some particular example, whether what you're doing is really important to the company's overall success, or whether something is a profit center or cost center (I find it more useful to think first about whether an individual employee is an Asset/Profit or Cost, and note that being a cost isn't necessarily bad but also types can change over time).

Still, even customer proximity is not always a useful distinction, and certainly doesn't have to be a static one. I wonder if this industry resists distinctions among people or groups like these due to something at the root of the hacker culture that created it, like a realization/commitment to the idea that the only really worthwhile distinction is the bit.

I'm not sure I buy the dark matter idea. In the US there are only on the order of a few million software developers, you don't have to go very far down a list of FAANG/FAANG-like high paying tech companies to reach on the order of a few hundred thousand US-employed programmers at those firms (~10% of the market, already exceeding ordinary matter's 5% of the universe). Decide on a consistent definition of tech company in general and add in all of the programmers from them and it wouldn't surprise me at all if tech company employees actually exceeded non-tech, though I can see it being the other way too, just not being "vast majority".

As for stories from roles at non-tech places, most are probably told orally (especially to fellow employees at larger companies as cautionary tales of the crazy messes out there that make their own current insanity look pretty sane) but also remember that at any given time like half of the professional market has been in it for less than 5 years (how many of them got into tech-company vs non-tech-company roles?). And remember you may have read stories from them but not realized it because the actual work regardless of line/staff or tech/non-tech company distinction itself for programmers can be so similar, so it's not always clear whether some story on e.g. The Daily WTF is from which (though sometimes it is or you can guess).

> I guarantee you at Duke Energy the contractors are second-class citizens

In fairness, I’d bet the full time devs are too.

the incentive structure is reversed in academia. staff are closer to adjuncts than full-time faculty positions in compensation and benefits

> The biggest downside to staff IME is that you are almost constantly reminded that you are a cost and at danger of being cut.

It seems like this shouldn't be an absolute that applies to all staff roles, just a sign of a company with an immature viewpoint on costs. Or even just an inconsistent one. Consider the electricity used to keep the office running, it's a cost, but no one would feel the urge to remind the utility company that it's a cost and therefore at danger of being cut. That "and therefore" isn't even true in general anyway. Pre-pandemic most would consider the risk of cutting the office electricity to be no higher than the risk of the company ceasing to exist for whatever reason, i.e. if the company goes the office also goes, and there aren't many other causes for the office to go for most companies so it's mostly vice-versa too. Similarly there are businesses basically entirely supported by staff teams/individuals doing maintenance of some old software, if they go, the business goes, and vice versa. Anyone trying to pull a "don't forget you're a cost and might get cut!" reminder on them would be an asshole. Meanwhile companies like Google have no problem killing off entire products and their teams (though I think they tend to re-purpose the programmers rather than officially lay them off) even though it's making on the order of ("only") $200m/yr in profit.

Sure, if people can get something for cheaper than they used to, or get rid of something they realize they don't need/want, there's incentive to do that and "cut costs" by that amount if they can, but this incentive applies regardless of the staff/line division. Maybe the cure is to remind line roles at such places that they too are in some vague danger.