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Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

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Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#161

Post by AlotOfReading »

0x445442 wrote: post #122
marssaxman wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The defense industry is a mammoth thing. Not everyone is going to see all of it, but "staff engineers" have been a thing in the military for like 150 years now. The staff descriptor just means they're specialists in some technical field like civil engineering or medicine that provide guidance and solve problems. The modern tech definition hasn't drifted very far.

We should rename all the accountants "staff" though.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#162

Post by eropple »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #66
eropple wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I took a Staff Engineer role and my job was to compensate for organizational dysfunction and fill voids left by underperforming managers, I'd be leaving that role very quickly. Either that or requesting a formal title change (or promotion) into an actual management position. Eh. You might not fit it, but I really like that role. I don't want to be out of technical conversations and I don't love reports, but I do…

> I, on the other hand, really like that role. I don't want to be out of technical conversations and I don't love reports, but I do really like facilitating a path forward. At the moment I'm working outside of an engineering function, but I do it when wearing that hat, too. iirc this kind of role, and other glue are actually really great Scrum Master && Project Manager skills.

You probably don't hire a project manager to also occasionally buckle down and write code, though. ;) Supersets, not subsets.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#163

Post by unethical_ban »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #54
agentultra wrote: post #16

One that I think might be missing is The Therapist : They are the glue that gets buy-in and agreement between people talking past each other. They demonstrate how a healthy organization can lead a team by setting guidelines for collaboration, communicating, being constructive, and removing barriers or silos between key stakeholders. They can resolve disagreements and unblock political stalemates with their unilateral…

> They are the glue that gets buy-in and agreement between people talking past each other. They demonstrate how a healthy organization can lead a team by setting guidelines for collaboration, communicating, being constructive, and removing barriers or silos between key stakeholders. That's a management function. If I took a Staff Engineer role and my job was to compensate for organizational dysfunction and fill voids…

A people manager isn't the person to build consensus between teams (necessarily). With complex technical problems, designs and discussions, it's the people with deep technical expertise and good communications skills who will play this role. At my previous employer, these were called "technical architects" but whatever you call them, they are not usually in the "manage other people" role.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#164

Post by alexfromapex »

tayo42 wrote: post #93
sbf501 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

im actually amazed you never ran into politics at work. you never needed to navigate around egos to get what you want, you do every thing purely on merit, every decision is only technical? my whole career as been filled with stuff like people forcing their pet projects on the company, people hiring their friends and dealing with their in crowd

Politics I’ve seen almost everywhere but nepotism and cronyism are horrible. I’ve experienced that firsthand at a startup, when a new CIO hired his unqualified buddies into leadership roles. One was a young female and he was a much older divorcee and it made my skin crawl.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#165

Post by [deleted] »

potatolicious wrote: post #128
sbf501 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 k…

[deleted]

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#166

Post by smegsicle »

lamontcg wrote: post #97
biscuits1 wrote: post #24

But what's your blast radius?

I'm more of a explosively formed penetrating round capable of cutting through heavy layers of reinforced technical debt.

"why do they call you 'copperjet'?"

watch!

blasts through twenty inches of solid boilerplate

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#167

Post by ip26 »

marssaxman wrote: post #21
efficax wrote: post #8

the fetishization of staff engineers is really fascinating. do they actually act as "force multipliers", are they really essential to the success of large engineering orgs? In my experience, they spend most of their time in meetings not doing much of anything at all.

I can't recall "staff engineer" being something people even talked about before ~2 years ago. It's strange to see this idea come up and become taken seriously, seemingly out of nowhere.

The cynical view is that this role used to be called “senior engineer”. However due to title inflation, it needed rebranding, and “staff” is the new name.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#168

Post by maerF0x0 »

eftychis wrote: post #113
maerF0x0 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next level politicians do a really broken implementation first cycle so they can deliver a solve next quarter for eye popping data driven results. I've personally warned people about terrible designs, saw them get implemented, they cost the company millions, but then they "improved" it next quarter to save the company "millions" ... They got promoted, I got called names like "too negative"... Great company.

I am guessing most/a lot of us have seen similar situations (unfortunately). (Sometimes, though situations like that are unavoidable -- given that demos can become product overnight or a deadline is unattainable no matter what you shave off. If I had a nickel for each time I had seen any of the above happen...)

yes there are shortcuts that one takes for a demo, but these were multimonth projects extending existing systems, it's not like the optimal solution was going to take much longer (if at all), we just needed an architect that understood computer science

I think my biggest failing in my career is in being able to convince people that just because they don't understand something doesn't mean it's harder to code. Many O(n^2) solutions take just as long to code as O(n), for example...

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#169

Post by dilyevsky »

Aeolun wrote: post #126
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.

Easy - you rope other engineers in to work on the implementation. Then if it works out you claim the credit, if not either scrap the project due to “change of direction/reprioritization” or throw them under the bus.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#170

Post by tjr225 »

29athrowaway wrote: post #145
zmj wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of an old essay: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-high-n... The thesis is that the "10x engineers" don't output a linear multiple of the same kind of work their peers do. Instead, they implement solutions that their peers wouldn't or couldn't over any length of time. This matches my experience.

The 10x engineer identifies common subproblems across different problems, and then creates a layer of reusable code which becomes a library. Then uses this library to write code 10x faster. The 10x engineer tries to standardize problems and solve them en-masse. The 1x engineer sees every problem as a different problem that requires a different solution. The 10x engineer talks about abstractions, the 1x engineer talks…

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