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Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

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Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#121

Post by jameshart »

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.

We’re talking about organizations where there are thousands of people all writing code.

The tricky part is making all that code add up to something meaningful, though, right?

A thousand developers diligently and efficiently working away in their IDEs building completely the wrong thing is a terrible waste, and not something that can be solved by just having a staff+ ‘fixer’ come along behind and clean up.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#122

Post by 0x445442 »

marssaxman wrote: post #110
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.

The term may well be as old as the tech industry, but I have somehow spent all 30-odd years of my career in said industry without hearing it discussed, until somewhat recently. I wonder what has changed. I don't think of the tech industry I have been working in as being related to defense much at all - I trace my computing roots back to the home computer era of the '80s. Perhaps there have been parallel streams which…

Yeah, I've been a software engineer since 1996, the first ten years in the defense industry and I never heard the title before a few years ago.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#124

Post by 0x445442 »

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…

So from my experience that link is describing what I've known as a Tech or Team Lead. But the link introduces another title, "Principle Engineer", that I've not encountered.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#125

Post by 0x445442 »

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.

Yeah... http://programming-motherfucker.com/

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#126

Post by Aeolun »

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…

How does that work exactly? I can absolutely commit an unmaintainable mess directly to master, but I’d be very quickly called out by my team.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#127

Post by Aeolun »

tzone wrote: post #96
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…

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.

> some of those can only be solved by handful of people

Ultimately it can probably be solved by other people, but it’d take multiple years.

I think the 10x is not so much because those engineers are particularly fast, it’s just that anyone else working in the domain is 10x slower.

Like if I tried to build a compiler, I’d quickly become known as a 0.1x engineer.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#128

Post by potatolicious »

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…

Politics is in the eye of the beholder I think, and even though toxic politicking at work is definitely real, I suspect a lot of what is accused as "politicking" is just sour grapes for people with poor people skills, and people who refuse to consider soft skills to be a necessary core competency, especially at senior and staff levels.

Take some of my practices for example: I lead and design many projects, and if I know a particular element of my proposal will be controversial for a particular stakeholder, I will schedule a review with them privately before to make sure the solution I'm proposing actually works for them, and also make any needed changes before getting in front of a larger audience. This ultimately just wastes less time for everyone and makes product better.

But for someone cynically inclined I'd be easily accused of some kind of backdoor politicking.

A lot of "politics" is just communication and soft skills.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#129

Post by hayst4ck »

jacobr1 wrote: post #108
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…

There is also the "positive" version of the politician. They have enough technical credibility, social skills, relationships with senior management, to remove organizational log-jams. Other companies might hire a consultant to come and tell them what they already know they need to do (but can't organizationally agree to do) - but with this archetype, you can call them in and they will cut out the bullshit, somehow wi…

I think that description matches the articles "architect" archetype:

> The Architect is responsible for the direction, quality and approach within a critical area, both today and stretching into the multi-year future horizon. They combine a deep knowledge of technical constraints, user needs, and organization level leadership.

The reason I labeled it politician is because they are primarily using their position for self-gain. A general definition for politics is any time the inequality company > team > self is violated (at least in terms of compensated work). I generally agree with that definition. That is why I used the word politician.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#130

Post by urthor »

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.

Motivated + enabled. 110%.

I will say. In terms of man hours, often those teams take a multiple of effort from people around the company to support.

They just, consume a lot of time and attention. From various business analysts, vice presidents reviewing their output, etc etc.

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