41–50 of 269 posts
https://careerkarma.com/blog/how-to-become-a-staff-engineer/
...which seems to be saying that a "staff" engineer is indistinguishable from what I'd call a senior developer.
As far as I'm concerned, "staff" is people that are permanently and directly employed. It doesn't mean "senior". If it's found it's way into the cycle of job-title inflation, that makes me sad.
This post is a draft version of the released version at [0]. [0]: https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-archetypes
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.
Code Wins Arguments
Unless the arguments are about "how to do the code correctly" for some value of correct that's imagined to be beneficial in the future.
One that I think might be missing is The Therapist : They are the glue that gets buy-in and agreement between people talking past each other. They demonstrate how a healthy organization can lead a team by setting guidelines for collaboration, communicating, being constructive, and removing barriers or silos between key stakeholders. They can resolve disagreements and unblock political stalemates with their unilateral…
Agree this is a key skill and necessary archetype in large orgs. But I'd call this person The Wolf (named after the Harvey Keitel's character in Pulp Fiction.
Does this person get to ride off into the sunset in a fancy sports car, with the babe from the junkyard?
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.
I wasn't familiar with the term "Staff Engineer", and wikipedia was no help. I found this: https://careerkarma.com/blog/how-to-become-a-staff-engineer/ ...which seems to be saying that a "staff" engineer is indistinguishable from what I'd call a senior developer. As far as I'm concerned, "staff" is people that are permanently and directly employed. It doesn't mean "senior". If it's found it's way into the cycle of jo…
They generally denote a management-level seniority, and they can be given staff, department head status, and a discretionary budget.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't recall "staff engineer" being something people even talked about before ~2 years ago. It's strange to see this idea come up and become taken seriously, seemingly out of nowhere.
> It's strange to see this idea come up and become taken seriously, seemingly out of nowhere. Nonsense it's as old as the tech industry, and the defence industry it grew out of. The name comes from the military, where it's even older.
I was curious about this, because I also think of the staff engineer as a newish thing, and I don't believe I've ever actually met one.
I searched my old email for the term and found that the first reference I have was in January 1996, in a HotWired HotFlash newsletter:
"Java - so-named because it evokes liveliness and speed - is the brainchild of Arthur van Hoff, a senior staff engineer at Sun Microsystems. He's the HotJava engineering lead, has designed most of the Java applet API, is the implementor of the current Java compiler, and is the author of the book "Hooked on Java." Get the scoop behind the hype, when Arthur van Hoff joins us in Club Wired on Friday, 12 January, at 12 p.m. PST (20:00 GMT)."
After that there's really nothing until the term starts appearing in LinkedIn notifications around 2010. I guess that just means it wasn't used in the circles I moved in, so only became visible to me when I joined LinkedIn.
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.
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.
Your IDE thing probably only applies to a 3 person startup where one or two of them are coding.
I agree with you: fix what needs to be fixed. But that can be human things too, not just code.