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The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review
201–210 of 251 posts
Re: The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Title inflation isn't specific to tech. Look at the banking industry, pretty much everyone is a VP or SVP of something.
Or sales. The startup I used to work at, absolutely everyone in sales had some kind of Director or higher title regardless of seniority or role. I guess the theory being you're more likely to take a call from the Senior Executive Director of Business Development (never mind that said Senior Executive Director is 23 years old and has zero decision making authority). I always wondered if people actually fell for this crap.
Re: The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
While you're not wrong I want to point out that you generally don't get the opportunities to practice staff-like skills until you've proven you can do the 'boring' work too. The system does incentivize performative leadership, but only for a relatively short amount of time in your career, so I don't think this is a huge deal.
Re: The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing that separates those guys from everyone else is simple. Its stamina. No there isn't some higher level of understanding or deep perception. Every one of the all time great programmers had 1 exact thing in common with no exceptions. Stamina. You will not find a single outlier. They did their craft every day, for many hours, year after year. So sure, any of us could have taken the individual small steps. But w…
Stamina isn't the word I would go for. It would be commitment. For those that have loads of stamina, it's the commitment to continuous creative encounters that leads to the perceived magic. From "Courage to Create" by Rollo May: "It is said that the novelist Thomas Wolfe, who was one of the highly creative figures of the American scene, that he was a "genius without talent." But he was so creative because he threw hi…
How about grit?
Re: The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review
#205> Your company might have a written definition of what good engineering means - written values, and engineering principles. But the clearest indicator of what the company values is what gets people promoted. This is really the takeaway you should have. Be observant of what is actually rewarded. Companies are made of people. Unless you're in some ultra bureaucratic government position that is 100% impossible to get ar…
Brilliant advice. I don’t like it because it involves doing things I don’t like. But all the most effective advice is like that.
Re: The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Title inflation isn't specific to tech. Look at the banking industry, pretty much everyone is a VP or SVP of something.
It's prolific because banking clients want to work with someone in a position of authority.
Re: The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my opinion this is a big reason software is so brittle, needs to be constantly patched and updated, and overall innovation in software moves very slowly. Having engineers do management work is undermining how hard engineering is -OR- underestimating how powerful software is. In other words, the Idea is that engineers adds more value to a company if they also do all these management tasks, which implies that engine…
I see it in a completely different lens. Engineering is hard. Good engineering more so. What's even harder is to manage those projects well without having the technical skill to understand it. Whenever I find a technically challenging & innovative project, there's always a technical lead/manager that makes it all possible.
Of course, but that means (at least it should mean IMHO) that an engineer made a career switch into management, and those skills carry over and are valuable. I think when a company pushes their engineers to do more and more non-technical tasks, no matter how small, it basically says they don't value engineering and see software problems as a problem of allocating people and resources instead of investing in better engineers and giving them control to innovate.
I'm not saying managers are not necessary. It just seems like there is a pyramid structure, and managers are at the top. If you want to be on top of the pyramid you must evolve into a manager and let others do the engineering. I'm willing to grant this is ok in non-software companies, but in software companies it's bizarre and I'm even thinking software engineers should be unionizing and getting some representation.
Re: The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review
#208Earlier 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…
The thing that separates those guys from everyone else is simple. Its stamina. No there isn't some higher level of understanding or deep perception. Every one of the all time great programmers had 1 exact thing in common with no exceptions. Stamina. You will not find a single outlier. They did their craft every day, for many hours, year after year. So sure, any of us could have taken the individual small steps. But w…
Understanding theory helps a lot. It's a hard limit on what your capable of making.
Re: The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review
#209Where 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 used to be awe inspired by the jvm code base and other “major” pieces of software. Then one day I realized that these code bases were the product of literally 10s of thousands of people years.
It’s not something anyone could do, but often it’s the product of what many can do.
Re: The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review
#210Where 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…
> people who make amazing things. They're not that different to the rest of us.
Clearly that can’t be true. “Amazing” by definition cannot be done by the average person.