Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer

lalitm.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 188 posts

Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer

#71

Post by cube00 »

maccard wrote: post #68
cube00 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Supporting , fixing project which I delivered over years and just take it easy, start day late, leave early until retirement. My experience has been you'll be regularly moved around to mitigate the "bus factor" If you're seen as highy capable you'll be moved on to firefighting duty.

Yep, and if this happens you need to get promoted quickly out of that or you’ll get stuck at it. It’s great fun, and you’ll learn about every project your company has going on by doing it.

>It’s great fun

If you don't set hard boundaries it's also the fast track to great burn out.

Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer

#73

Post by spl757 »

Small business, small team, gets shit done.

Large corporation, more meetings about what to do than doing it, power trips, drama, backstabbing, you name it. Keep you head on a swivel at megacorp.

I've learned that twice when both startups I worked for were sold. They made millions, I was shown the door. Any business that talks about being "family" or any of that crap is a cult, stay away.

I stopped working to make shareholders rich, and started working for myself. I don't believe anyone will ever truly get what they want out of life working for someone else.

Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer

#74

Post by suburban_strike »

wpasc wrote: post #6

The author notes: > One caveat: my experience comes mainly from working on infrastructure and developer tools at large companies, on teams where engineers have a lot of bottom-up autonomy to influence their roadmaps. In a more top-down environment, there may simply be less room to work this way. I wonder if the overall trend in tech is that engineers are experiencing less bottom-up autonomy and more top-down controll…

I noticed what you describe 5 years ago.

Since then, not only have we lost autonomy, but there was no top-down direction to begin with. And there is none now.

Nobody knows what the next incentive to chase is, so they're liquidating headcount and engaging in fraud to appear profitable.

(re: fraud, I'm learning the hard way why my own employer's stock price dramatically improved-- ever since they switched to stack ranking, they just make shit up to PIP and deny severance ahead of layoffs.)

Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer

#75

Post by Syntaf »

Great article and super relevant advice. As building becomes easier and easier in our career those with the agency to find problems worth solving become x10 more productive.

Like other people in this thread are also saying, the more you master this skill the more often you'll have people finding *you* to give them their problems, which only makes this easier.

Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer

#76

Post by DenisM »

intoXbox wrote: post #20

The part I find challenging in the senior-staff twilight is that having deep technical knowledge means I can solve short term problems, just as requests, fast and effectively. The author mentions that you should spend time understanding the frustrations from other teams, but that takes up loads of time and I don’t like being the person who talks and talks but doesn’t push code and ship features. I’d love to hear how…

Once upon a time my grand-grand-boss explained that he had no problem hiring top-notch engineers - pick up the phone, call recruiters for new candidates, connect the incoming stream to the interview pipeline, two months later you get the requested quantity of engineers. OTOH there is no repeatable process to hire someone who will help identify the right problems and drive them to resolution. So if such person is found they will be pushed towards doing things that have no obvious success recipe and away from the things that do.

> I don’t like being the person who talks and talks but doesn’t push code and ship features

It was fun while it lasted, wasn’t it?

Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer

#77

Post by joshuamorton »

Neywiny wrote: post #35

It's interesting how engineer/developer levels are so meaningless across organizations. Where I am, somebody who can only do the work assigned to them isn't senior. That's borderline entry level. Doesn't mean they're a bad programmer or only have 3 hours of experience, just isn't at the higher level. Seems where this person works (Google?) that threshold is at staff

It depends on what you mean. There's lots of ways of looking at this, but I'd think of "entry level" as someone who is assigned individual tasks, and maybe needs help or oversight on completing them. Someone senior is assigned a project, or even a problem (and certainly has input on which projects they work on), and can handle the entire process of investigating, proposing, designing, and implementing the solution to that problem, which may involve oversight or tracking of other people.

Staff+ is additionally directly influencing which projects the org is prioritizing.

Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer

#78

Post by hyperhello »

xandrius wrote: post #64
hyperhello wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not overthinking can be a superpower, but writing eloquently can be a superpower, and not trailing cliches behind your pen can be a superpower.

Now everyone is a bloody writing critic and everything is a piece of master literature that needs to be criticised as such.

No, but I’m getting really tired of seeing things that took less effort to write than it does to read. People have to process this AI-influenced LinkedIn-influenced SEO-optimized Reddit-template dung heap of worthless content-style and get past it, because even though expectations may be low, it’s in bad taste to the point that it’s starting to embarrass on a cultural scale.

Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer

#79

Post by therealdrag0 »

ryandrake wrote: post #66
9dev wrote: post #2

Funny people should have that problem. I have spent most of my career in the startup space, and my experience has consistently been that the amount of problems to solve is vastly larger than what I can reasonably achieve in my waking hours. So I don't find problems to solve, I try to assess which problems are most urgent, or which solution solves several of them at once. Learning to get that kind of prioritisation ri…

Exactly. Everywhere I've worked had at least 3-4X more bugs than we had capacity to fix, and the bug count grew over time, net of any fixing happening. There was never difficulty finding problems to solve. Unfortunately most places don't give engineering the autonomy to solve critical issues. It's just feature cram and redesigns, over and over, and let the bugs pile up.

The challenge is finding problems that are “worth” solving as a staff engineer. General “bugs” are not staff worthy. Staff need to convince leadership to fix an architectural problem that removes a whole class of bug.

Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer

#80

Post by zbentley »

theideaofcoffee wrote: post #65

The biggest problem of a sTaFF eNGInEeR can be solved right away: stop writing about this crap. All of these titles are so meaningless where one organization's staff is another's junior is another's CEO, it doesn't matter because all of the organizational insanity that lead you to your coveted title means jack anywhere else. I should write a big ol' think piece from my perspective as a Senior Staff Distinguished Prin…

Eh, it’s valuable advice to a lot of people. Titles are bullshit and all over the place, true, but “how to approach the changing responsibilities that come with growing out of the kind of roles you’re used to” is useful to people regardless of what the role is called.
Post reply on HN