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What is the difference between a senior engineer and a staff engineer?
I've worked for companies where staff engineer is below senior engineer and for companies where the opposite is true.
And I have worked for a company where everyone is just a staff engineer with no titles to differentiate, liked this setup the best.
There is no industry standard, each company labels things differently.
Tl;dr you have to be grifter-grinder and disregard all the “important” bullshit of mentoring, interviewing, training as only shipping will give you a slight chance of promotion. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42319997
That’s definitely not true, you can do both.
What is the difference between a senior engineer and a staff engineer?
I think this a big contributor to gendered wage gaps
So many people I’ve talked to are worried about how they come across to colleagues in their current organization and are worried about glass ceilings there
While the competition is absolutely coming across as too cocky and too abrasive, but continues interviewing at different companies until it hits, not worried about any ceiling or “terminal titles” at the current organization
If people are playing completely different games, the outcome cant really be compared
One tell-tale sign is that the article talks as much about which important contributions "won't get you there" as about which will. Including acknowledging that it's all important! Let all those dumb folks do all that other important stuff, focus selfishly on the hype-of-the-day topics so you can bag that sweet promotion. Relying on that there are many other folks that do the boring and less sexy stuff that keeps the light on. And which is ultimately necessary to lift you into your sweet promotion. Just that you want the credit, not those other folks. I'd be deeply resentful of somebody doing this ego-trip, and therefore, again, I'm glad my place doesn't have this divisive nonsense.
I don't agree with the mentoring and leading part not being important except as a mediator to shipping. Mentoring and leading increases your soft power by giving people the opportunity to like you. This power can translate even to the next company since tech can be a small world.
What is the difference between a senior engineer and a staff engineer?
The definitions are arbitrary and vary - sometimes wildly or completely opposite - from company to company and industry to industry. Some companies don't use titles at all and use levels - which are also arbitrary and differ accordingly.
If you never leave the incestuous Silicon Valley bubble, however, you may never learn this.