Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

Archetypes are useful in how you sell yourself. Don't forget that it's not what you are, just how you sell yourself.

You can change between these every review cycle, job, career, all you want - no one in management is keeping track of your "archetype". They are keeping track of your impact.

Lastly, you are the "person in the box" once you are senior enough. Take the archetypes, look at your org, and see which they need. Whatever is missing will be the most value to the org. How you see yourself accomplishing that box is the real challenge of executives, not this endless "what color parachute are you" self evaluation.

Has anyone read Tanya Reilly's new book "The Staff Engineer's Path"? Wondering if there's overlap in the concepts/model.

the fetishization of staff engineers is really fascinating. do they actually act as "force multipliers", are they really essential to the success of large engineering orgs? In my experience, they spend most of their time in meetings not doing much of anything at all.

Avoid all these other types except Solver (we call it Fixer at FB). Anyone who calls themselves these things is weird, and will be hard to rely on.

Disregard levels. Disregard titles. Fix what needs to be fixed. Unit tests, CI, docs, there's no such thing as grunt work. Real leadership happens in the IDE and only code matters - everything else is overhead.