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Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

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Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#51

Post by hkarthik »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #45
hkarthik wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> But I'd call this person The Wolf Does this person get to ride off into the sunset in a fancy sports car, with the babe from the junkyard?

I've seen the Wolf in a few companies and they are given some special treatment for sure. The corporate equivalent of the babe and the sports car.

Years ago, one of them had a Macbook Pro while the rest of us were dealing with garbage Dell laptops that barely worked due to aggressive security scanners. He got his turned off by IT.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#52

Post by lxe »

The Solver archetype and mindset if often overlooked and unrewarded in large organizations where staff level engineers are expected to be bogged down either with "strategic" work, or other high level bureaucratic shenanigans. If you're a "solver", the trick is to meticulously gather metrics about the impact of your work, and always put them front and center when you communicate about what you've achieved.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#53

Post by opportune »

denton-scratch wrote: post #41

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…

“Staff” has been a regular title for SV software companies for quite a while now.

It is basically the next level past “senior”. Whereas a senior will normally report to a line manager, staff engineers will often report to a middle manager and have managers as their peers.

A normal range for a senior is 5-10 years of experience (but still many people will have more experience than that but not be “senior” depending on company), whereas staff is 10+ years. Obviously these are not wholly sufficient conditions but they’re common buckets, especially for external hiring.

There is some title inflation going on where staff engineers are typically acting more as tech/team leads as opposed to senior engineers. IMO it’s a good title because “principal” has connotations of doing really big-picture stuff that may involve some resting on laurels. Also the bar for “principal” varies widely across companies - at Microsoft it’s the same as “Staff” at other places, at some places it’s like the top <1% of IC engineers, others are probably even more lax than MS.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#54

Post by PragmaticPulp »

agentultra wrote: post #16

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…

> 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.

That's a management function.

If I took a Staff Engineer role and my job was to compensate for organizational dysfunction and fill voids left by underperforming managers, I'd be leaving that role very quickly. Either that or requesting a formal title change (or promotion) into an actual management position.

Hiring a Staff Engineer when you really need better managers isn't a good solution, especially because a Staff Engineer wouldn't have the necessary org structure authority to be an effective manager-of-managers.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#55

Post by [deleted] »

voz_ wrote: post #10

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.

[deleted]

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#56

Post by hideo »

voz_ wrote: post #10

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 consider myself a 'Solver'/'Fixer', mainly because that's the title others gave me, and I mostly disagree with this.

Specifically the problem with me is I don't have deep expertise in any area. This is fine in most cases but there are areas where expertise is important. And more often than not titles and levels are a reasonably proxy for expertise in a large organization. Turns out asking "who's the expert in X" really, really doesn't work once you disregard titles and levels. Disregarding titles and levels is a good way to turn engineering into a popularity contest so "who's the expert in X" becomes "who do I know best who recently said something like X to me"

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#57

Post by chrisseaton »

cannam wrote: post #48
chrisseaton wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Nonsense it's as old as the tech industry, and the defence industry it grew out of. 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 th…

What were influential engineers called in the companies you were in before?

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#58

Post by polygotdomain »

agentultra wrote: post #16

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…

I certainly think that role is missing, but I don't think it's at a role of a staff engineer. In my experience, _The Therapist_ has the ear of a lot of senior people, and more importantly their trust. They understand the technical issues as well as the business problems, but more importantly understand the personalities and politics of the organization. These are the people who can convince people that if they give up a little, then they can get a lot in return. They generally tame strong-arm managers that are just looking for more headcount or more prominent projects that tend to drown out other projects or initiatives that are genuinely needed.

Those people are an absolute necessity, and I think it's very tough for someone to be effective in that role if they don't have a solid technical understanding, but I also don't think that an engineer has the clout to wrangle people the way a _therapist_ needs to. In a small organization, maybe, but at a decent size, mid-sized company and larger it will need to be someone working on the business side, not development or IT operations

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#59

Post by renlo »

What about the archetype Staff Software Engineer who’s good at creating a promo packet but not good at much else? They come into an org, replace some open source / well-documented well-built tool with an undocumented poorly working tool, then they convince other org members to use this new tool as they actively disable or undermine the existing tool. Come promo time they now have a line in their promo packet “built new tool, drove adoption of said tool to 80%”. At the last company I worked it seemed like a good many of the staff engineers were like this, though may be just the symptoms of a company with braindrain.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#60

Post by siliconc0w »

other possible types:

0) the wizened emeritus engineers staffed with special 'futures' or 'next-gen' bluesky type projects

1) engineers who may not be overly technical anymore but are really good at negotiating the organizational hierarchy and might know where and how to poke and pull at the cybernetic organism to nudge it in a desired direction

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