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The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review

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Re: The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review

#171

Post by gabereiser »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #43
JackMorgan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Titles are very much diluted. I've seen companies hire college sophomores who have never heard of the concept of a database and make them Sr Engineers on a analytics teams. I've seen Sr Engineers hired with one year of relevant experience. At this point, "Sr Engineer" is just the new "Jr Engineer". There's nothing wrong with this, but indeed, Staff Engineer tends to mean 8+ years of experience.

It's because we still have no standards as a profession. Whatever bullshit trends in silicon valley, suddenly everyone follows it, petrified that they might get left behind or are missing some important new thing. I remember when Systems Administrator was a noble and important profession full of smart, talented people. But a lot of people misunderstood it and made fun of it, so it became an unattractive title, and in…

This is the way.

("Sr. Prompt Engineer", "Visual Strategist", "Director of Front of House") People want to have some leverage to get things they want done, done. Sys Admin -> DevOps (Cloud) Engineer. Things change. Adapt or die.

If you read IBM's coding standards from 1980 and compared them to Google's from 2000s and then to Today's AI journey, you would have complaints about each. Processes form from people. Change comes from people.

Re: The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review

#172

Post by urthor »

Xeoncross wrote: post #15

Where do all the hardcore engineering jobs live? I've been bothered by the fact that most advanced engineering roles like "staff" actually mean "manager who does system design as well" Where are the docker/redis/next.js/linux kernel/qt/roller-coaster tycoon creators? Where are the people creating amazing software and do they get a special "advanced developer" title? I guess, I'm curious if there are actual roles in c…

Research.

End of the day, everyone at Bell Labs was a researcher with a PhD.

Engineering, bringing research to people, trends to CRUD over time.

Re: The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review

#173

Post by jameshart »

UncleMeat wrote: post #46
Xeoncross wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are we saying that software engineering can be at odds with your ability to write code? I'm not sure most people would say they are quite the dichotomy you present here. While I agree it's often a team-sport, being able to create amazing things yourself (i.e. Git, Redis, RollerCoaster Tycoon, Rust and other single-person projects) that others struggle to replicate or contribute too shouldn't mean you're a bad soft…

Not quite. I am saying that there is a meaningful difference between the process of working with other people over time and with resource constraints and writing software alone without time or resource constraints. Being skilled at writing programs doesn't harm one's ability to make decisions according to engineering principles. I actually don't know for certain that writing Rollercoaster Tycoon in assembly was the n…

Engineering, vs. craftsmanship.

They are vastly different disciplines. Especially engineering on a large team.

Re: The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review

#174

Post by onos »

onion2k wrote: post #74
Xeoncross wrote: post #15

Where do all the hardcore engineering jobs live? I've been bothered by the fact that most advanced engineering roles like "staff" actually mean "manager who does system design as well" Where are the docker/redis/next.js/linux kernel/qt/roller-coaster tycoon creators? Where are the people creating amazing software and do they get a special "advanced developer" title? I guess, I'm curious if there are actual roles in c…

Where are the docker/redis/next.js/linux kernel/qt/roller-coaster tycoon creators? Something I learned relatively late in my career was that really impressive work is the result of iterations in tiny steps. When you see something that makes you go "WOW! I could never do that!" you're seeing the final result of a long journey, and you probably could have taken each small step with a bit of effort. There's no need for…

I can’t relate to this, as it seems to imply you just don’t believe that really talented people exist and that these people can accomplish things other simply can’t. Doesn’t jive with my experience.

Re: The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review

#175

Post by jameshart »

etamponi wrote: post #70
simonw wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been bothered by the fact that most advanced engineering roles like "staff" actually mean "manager who does system design as well" The definition I have generally seen for "staff engineer" is an engineering leadership position without direct reports - I see "manager" as generally meaning "has direct reports". I think this is important: leadership and management are not the same things!

Can you explain better the difference? I am trying to figure this out myself for a while...

The best distinction I have heard is that you lead people, and you manage things.

People whose job title is manager might have to lead people too, but they're being held accountable for managing a thing. A project, a product, a budget, a release, a software system. Managing means 'making sure the thing happens'.

What a staff+ engineer is held accountable for is engineering. What gets built and how. That a technical solution meets its requirements and constraints.

In order to do that they might also need to lead people. But they don't have to manage anything.

Re: The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review

#176

Post by JackFr »

mywittyname wrote: post #88
onion2k wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are the docker/redis/next.js/linux kernel/qt/roller-coaster tycoon creators? Something I learned relatively late in my career was that really impressive work is the result of iterations in tiny steps. When you see something that makes you go "WOW! I could never do that!" you're seeing the final result of a long journey, and you probably could have taken each small step with a bit of effort. There's no need for…

When I worked at mega corps, I'd see a "new" tech emerged that was always very similar to a software that our company had developed to solve similar issues. I remember terraform getting released and seeing that it was just an inferior version of the Cloud Formation Template generator someone at my company had invented years prior. I've seen this happen so many times and every time, I'm surprised that more businesses…

My experience at mega corps has been the opposite: instead of a widespread, open source, robust implementation we had to suffer with a home grown, poorly supported, buggy, inferior product because it had the sponsorship of a politically important executive.

Truly dispiriting to be unable to use JSON or Protobuf, because some executive director claims his “standard” is better when it is demonstrably not so. In the end it breeds a culture of mediocrity — management has made it clear that engineering excellence is not a priority. So support the business use case, but do whatever …

Re: The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review

#177

Post by jameshart »

rmk wrote: post #130
Xeoncross wrote: post #15

Where do all the hardcore engineering jobs live? I've been bothered by the fact that most advanced engineering roles like "staff" actually mean "manager who does system design as well" Where are the docker/redis/next.js/linux kernel/qt/roller-coaster tycoon creators? Where are the people creating amazing software and do they get a special "advanced developer" title? I guess, I'm curious if there are actual roles in c…

There aren't too many hardcore engineering jobs. They are being done in startups where hard problems are being solved, and even there the average startup is just a website which is acting as a broker in a two-sided marketplace, or some variant thereof. If you step back and think about it, it makes sense. The majority of companies are one-trick ponies, maybe following up with a few additional products. Incremental dev…

Why do so many people in the tech industry have so little respect for their peers who work elsewhere in the industry?

The idea that large companies aren't solving hard problems, that that's only being done at startups, and that large companies are 'one trick ponies' is just incredibly myopic. Have you worked at a large publicly traded tech company?

Sure, in any business a bunch of the systems will be trivial. In larger businesses - especially ones that have grown through acquisition - there's also some scaling-law complexity that means they have to also do a bunch of annoyingly trivial work gluing together lots of duplicative and redundant trivial systems. When you look in from the outside of a large business that mess can definitely obscure the fact that at the heart that stuff is all in support of, usually, several significant and impressive engineering achievements, which support and drive that business forward. And they're probably performing operations that, from the outside, you would hear the name of and think 'well, that doesn't sound very difficult'.

I'm going to give a non-software example, that I think might show a little bit of an analogy for how 'engineering' at big companies can be at the same time operating at a complexity you wouldn't imagine, and yet be accomplishing something you might think from the outside is totally trivial.

Jump to this timestamp in the recent Smarter Everyday video about Kodak's film manufacturing line: https://youtu.be/mrJP82ZZiag?t=1742

See that workshop? Those precision engineered toolheads they call 'hearts' are the punch+die sets that they use to cut sprocket-holes in film. Everything there is bespoke, custom-made, and meets constraints you would never have thought of. It's engineered.

Software engineering in large companies is like that. If you don't think that banks contain software systems as complex and carefully engineered as those hearts? Or that manufacturing control software isn't in the same league? Or that the inventory management systems that drive a large retail business aren't on that level? You just have no idea what engineering is.

Re: The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review

#178

Post by jldugger »

Xeoncross wrote: post #15

Where do all the hardcore engineering jobs live? I've been bothered by the fact that most advanced engineering roles like "staff" actually mean "manager who does system design as well" Where are the docker/redis/next.js/linux kernel/qt/roller-coaster tycoon creators? Where are the people creating amazing software and do they get a special "advanced developer" title? I guess, I'm curious if there are actual roles in c…

> Where are the docker/redis/next.js/linux kernel/qt/roller-coaster tycoon creators

Well, we know stories behind each of these:

- linux kernel: comp sci Msc student - redis: written by a startup founder (in TCL[1]) - next.js: written by a founder of Vercel (as "Zeit") - rollercoaster tycoon: written by one dude in scottland

None of these people are Staff Engineers, in the sense of this book. You may find a few traveling between big tech companies but mostly as a prestige recruiting / consulting role. Or Torvalds, whose finances I don't really understand -- multiple sources say he gets a million dollar salary from the linux foundation?

You might also argue that the people who put more value on their skills as "hardcore engineer" end up in small firms and startups where equity comp can end up paying them what they're worth if the skills pan out. There was a "why is Google behind openAI even though they published the transformers paper" post recently that hinted that all the authors have left google for greener pastures, which supports this thesis.

[1] https://gist.github.com/antirez/6ca04dd191bdb82aad9fb241013e...

Re: The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review

#179

Post by pitched »

suchire wrote: post #168
hgsgm wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are your people asking so many bad questions? Good questions are "how can we X?" And good answers are "here's how: Y" Then the asker decides if they are willing and able to Y.

Because most questions are not bad questions. In isolation, if you have good teammates, ideas and questions are good. It’s just that you have to say “No” in the broader context, because you always have a limited budget of time and money

If the constraint is time and money, maybe that could be the answer instead of a hard no? Like, “the project you’re currently on is making X dollars per day and the new idea has to at least match that.” You might start getting more interesting proposals if you train your people to pitch them properly.

Re: The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review

#180

Post by ergocoder »

digging wrote: post #81
ergocoder wrote: post #61

This cult of staff engineers really need to go away. People read it and all of them like to act like a staff engineer when in fact there are only available slots for a fraction of the engineers. Now nobody wants to fix bugs and improve product quality. Why? Because those tasks are not staff-level work. The reward system and the definition doesn't work.

Alternatively, I've worked with Staff Engineers who are still fixing bugs, and also building (maybe staff-level?) tooling and project improvements. The most significant issue is the lack of standardization of expectations. "Staff" doesn't mean anything in a vacuum because it doesn't mean the same thing between any two companies. Personally, I love doing senior stuff. I don't know if I even want to be staff at any poi…

> Staff Engineers who are still fixing bugs, and also building (maybe staff-level?) tooling and project improvements

Because they already have the title of staff, and now their success is the team's success, so they are okay with doing boring work.

However, this will not get them to senior staff.

If you are not a staff and want to be promoted, this isn't the way to go.

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