Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020) • Hacker News Board

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#91

Post by pc86 » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 9:54 PM UTC

dogleash wrote: post #69

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.

>Real leadership happens in the IDE lolwut? Do people actually believe these kinds of things? Like what comprehensive leadership happens solely in an IDE? > there's no such thing as grunt work It sounds like this messaging for people who are on a career track that will never not be grunt work. And even if the goal was to lead someone into being the best code grunt possible, how do you lead them to that point through…

> Do people actually believe these kinds of things?

Most don't, no. But you'll definitely find a higher percentage of people who do at places like FB.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#92

Post by joshuamorton » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 9:58 PM UTC

davidthewatson wrote: post #70

> Right Hands often dive into a fire, edit the approach, and delegate execution to the most appropriate team, and then pop over to the next fire elsewhere in the organization. > The Solver and Right Hand bounce from fire to fire, often having more transactional interactions with the folks they’re working with on any given week. It's worth noting that Ben Purgason from LinkedIn, identified Firefighters as stage 1 and…

"Firefighting" is being used in two different contexts here. In the SRE document, it means literal incident response, while in the Staff Eng context, it means "addressing whatever the organizational P0 is", which may occasionally be a literal incident, but it may also be developing an incident response team, or lending a hand to a project that is behind schedule, or...whatever.

There's always something that is highest priority, and having a floating person(s) who can continually identify and provide support for whatever that thing is isn't a sign of a dysfunctional organization.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#93

Post by tayo42 » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 9:59 PM UTC

sbf501 wrote: post #77

hayst4ck wrote: post #40

This is jaded and angry, but I think there is another archetype called "the politician." They play the game extremely well, providing poorly thought out solutions quickly to problems they haven't dug into the complexity of. They lay operational traps everywhere in their quest to get things done fast (like directly embedding config data in code to avoid fixing the config format). Once they've picked the low hanging fr…

Since we're being anecdotal: I think that claim is jaded and angry, and makes me wonder what kinds of companies people have worked at. Honestly, I've only encountered this once or twice, and I've been a career engineer since 1989 at places like IBM, Intel, and Microsoft. Dozens of positions and groups, and I've never had to play politics. Maybe I've just worked at "good" companies (irony noted), but in my experience…

im actually amazed you never ran into politics at work. you never needed to navigate around egos to get what you want, you do every thing purely on merit, every decision is only technical?

my whole career as been filled with stuff like people forcing their pet projects on the company, people hiring their friends and dealing with their in crowd

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#94

Post by adra » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:05 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #74

ble wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually think of an at-work "politician" as somehow taking advantage of relationships or social forces. What you describe sounds more to me like the ""10X engineer"" (with extra scare quotes for good measure). Many people have been skeptical of the idea of the 10X engineer. One take is that if your normal engineers are less than 1/10th as productive as another engineer and all of them are merely human beings, there…

I've seen 10x engineers. They do exist. However I've never seen them in isolation. It's more like teams of 10x engineers. I've seen teams of people who just get 10x more work done than equivalent teams elsewhere, usually because they consist of a bunch of amazing engineers and are enabled by management to get things done.

I'd generally agree to this. The most recent job I've worked at have amazing management buy-in and empowerment by management to just "get things done fast" that ends up working amazingly well because the freedom we've been given translates to great results.

This is a little catch-22 in getting started though. A great team held back by management hesitation can demotivate and cause attrition. Management buy-in for ineffective teams will run faster by bypassing many org hurdles fall over by their own inability to execute solutions that pass the test of time. It seems like these rare "10x" teams are hard to form in companies that can't consistently attract and retain very talented ICs

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#95

Post by bgro » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:11 PM UTC

hayst4ck wrote: post #40

This is jaded and angry, but I think there is another archetype called "the politician." They play the game extremely well, providing poorly thought out solutions quickly to problems they haven't dug into the complexity of. They lay operational traps everywhere in their quest to get things done fast (like directly embedding config data in code to avoid fixing the config format). Once they've picked the low hanging fr…

This is almost exclusively what I've encountered in most of the "elite" engineers. It's frustrating because they're the ones saying coding and job hopping is easy. They're the ones in tech interviews who downplay your achievements.

In my experience, rather than leaving for another company though, they're often a C-suite favorite and get to start some new project (often it's whatever they want to do as long as it's remotely justifiable). They get it up to 80% complete so they can hand it off to another team to do the last 20%.

Since the project is whatever they want to do, they use very unusual languages or design choices that the new team has to pick up and fix. A lot of times it's whatever the big new thing is. (For example, expect statements like this: "Everything is obsolete legacy code now that Electron exists!" "No need to keep this standalone offline test database, setup shell scripts, or maintain the environment setup guide because Docker will automatically solve all of these cases!")

They continue getting new projects because these 1 or 2 people "did the project 80% complete in 1 month, and the last 20% is taking the handoff team of five at least 3 months to do."

Bonus points when it is expanded from some sort of hackathon, or some fake story about how some person completed the 80% portion over the weekend. In the former, all the connections and APIs are hard-coded and faked for their demo. In the latter, they had actually been working on this for the past couple months instead of doing their assigned work which made their official team look even less productive.

I was on the teams always picking up the last 20%, but I got moved onto the 80% team once. I was amazed at how much code I could blow through with time to spare when I didn't have to worry about all the edge cases and minute details.

Unfortunately, I got temporarily moved onto a company-wide prod support team which then got cut due to covid. Hooray.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#96

Post by tzone » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:12 PM UTC

ble wrote: post #65

hayst4ck wrote: post #40

This is jaded and angry, but I think there is another archetype called "the politician." They play the game extremely well, providing poorly thought out solutions quickly to problems they haven't dug into the complexity of. They lay operational traps everywhere in their quest to get things done fast (like directly embedding config data in code to avoid fixing the config format). Once they've picked the low hanging fr…

I usually think of an at-work "politician" as somehow taking advantage of relationships or social forces. What you describe sounds more to me like the ""10X engineer"" (with extra scare quotes for good measure). Many people have been skeptical of the idea of the 10X engineer. One take is that if your normal engineers are less than 1/10th as productive as another engineer and all of them are merely human beings, there…

If you have never seen a 10x engineer you either have never worked with truly talented people or you haven’t worked on actual hard problems.

There aren’t just 10 or 100x engineers , there are even infinityX engineers when you work on actual hard problems because some of those can only be solved by handful of people.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#97

Post by lamontcg » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:13 PM UTC

biscuits1 wrote: post #24

But what's your blast radius?

I'm more of a explosively formed penetrating round capable of cutting through heavy layers of reinforced technical debt.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#98

Post by alex-mohr » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:13 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #57

cannam wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Member of Technical Staff, or MTS

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#99

Post by lamontcg » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:14 PM UTC

I'm pretty sure I've worn both the Team Lead, Architect, and Solver hats at the same time.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#100

Post by lhorie » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:15 PM UTC

A little meta commentary: I'm seeing a lot of negative takes using the word "they" (so presumably these are from people who either haven't worked in a staff eng capacity, or have, but in dysfunctional organizations).

The intent of this article (as I understand it) was to help people navigate the emerging nebulous role that "staff engineer" was, particularly as it started to become a more mainstream concept a few years ago (whereas prior to it, the dichotomy was largely that senior was "the" terminal IC role and you had to transition to management past that).

Many engineers on the upper side of the senior spectrum have clearly been operating above and beyond what is typically considered senior level, but not in the capacity of a typical manager archetype, so this was meant to help people understand how to identify/categorize these people as well as help people understand what kinds of challenges to look at after you've become a "full-fledged" senior engineer. Resources are useful, whodathunkit.

My advice for those eyeing for a staff+ level would be to avoid making "hot take" categories, everyone can do that and if they're coming from a position of inexperience w/ the subject matter, there's a good chance it's a bad take. Instead, try to derive action items from each of the archetypes, and incorporate those into your work. A good point I heard is that no staff engineer qualifies as a single archetype exclusively; the role is usually a mix of all archetypes, with different people leaning more strongly one way vs another.

It's very easy to make sour comments like "oh staff people just spend all their time in meetings, what good are they for". It's quite another to be that staff engineer and have to balance technical depth acquisition, alignment among disparate groups and the multiplexing required to operate at high levels at both. It's easy to chalk it up to politics, but it's quite another to be able to visualize power structures as tools, and use them as such to accomplish large scale engineering goals. There are classes of engineering challenges that only really arise at the staff+ engineer level, and engaging with them can be rewarding in their own right.