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Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

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Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#181

Post by scarface74 »

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…

> The 1x engineer talks about their car and weekend, the 10x engineer talks about technology.

Call me a proud member of the 1x engineer club. When I close my laptop at the end of the day or even when I’m having lunch with my coworkers, few people would know that I’m an “engineer” at all. The list of things that I care about more than technology in my non work life is a mile long. Technology is a means to an end - to support my addiction to food and shelter.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#182

Post by scarface74 »

didip wrote: post #151
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…

The politician is totally a thing at large FAANG companies! It took a while for people to figure out their BS and when it's finally unearthed, two years has passed and they are ready to move on to another team or company and repeat the cycle. Sometimes they even get a promo before their rube goldberg machinery is finished and someone else had to take the fall.

You have to be a politician at a tech companies. Your promo docs depend on it. How can you show “scope” or “cross team impact” without some amount of politicking?

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#183

Post by scarface74 »

hayst4ck wrote: post #144
woah wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their crappy code might be generating millions of dollars in revenue while you fix it and curse their name

True! But it might also grind the company's ability to release features to a halt creating a stagnant stock price and an underwhelming IPO because they chose to avoid the hard work of migrating, refactoring, and simplifying, or setting a culture of maintainable code preferring more easily marketable (and probably more fun and less failure prone) feature work that also looks much better on a resume.

Counterexample: Twitter. Every indication is that the code base was horrible. They found product market fit, got funding and went public.

Amazon codebase was also famously barely held together by duct tape for the first few years

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#184

Post by scarface74 »

ip26 wrote: post #167
marssaxman wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also see “devops engineer”

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#185

Post by civilized »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #36

A lot of small and medium companies don't really know what to do with Staff Engineers. Not knowing what else to do, they default to something like the "Right Hand" archetype in this document, where they're reporting to someone important but lacking in any direct authority or accountability of their own. These positions can be very comfortable if the person isn't directly responsible for anything, but they can use the…

I am a Team Lead and I have mixed feelings about it, some for reasons you give here.

My manager handles the overhead of having reports, which is large at my company. But people only work toward my goals if my manager motivates them to, and most of his mental energy goes towards a separate fiefdom of his, not my team. And I have never had any control whatsoever over who is on my team - except in a couple serendipitous situations, where I made much better choices than the ones that were made for me.

Overall I feel forced to work with entrenched incompetence and semi-competence, but at least I am rewarded fairly well for doing well in spite of this.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#186

Post by throwaway09223 »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #171
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hiring well" or hiring "the best" isn't a panacea. People change. Before I had kids, I was working hard, working late nights, and some of my work was all-consuming. After, I've definitely had periods where my main focus was on showing up to meetings and making sure I got at least pretty okay on my performance reviews, while actually focusing on, y'know, not work. If the company doesn't punish people for becoming hal…

I don't think there's anything wrong being this 1x engineer. In fact, the 10x engineer is probably only being paid a touch more for doing a lot more work and having a lot worse work-life balance.

> In fact, the 10x engineer is probably only being paid a touch more for doing a lot more work and having a lot worse work-life balance.

Sometimes, sure.

But often (especially later in a career) overperforming people operate a bit more like senior partners. They have jr staff / understudies to handle crank turning. They can give direction and set things on a solid path without necessarily putting in a ton of hours.

In a healthy org, this is the "architect" role. Or sometimes the "solver," or some combination thereof. I'm sure you're familiar with the adage about the guy who charges $10k to mark the problem, $1 for the time and $9,999 for knowing where to make the mark.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#187

Post by maerF0x0 »

scarface74 wrote: post #181
29athrowaway wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The 1x engineer talks about their car and weekend, the 10x engineer talks about technology. Call me a proud member of the 1x engineer club. When I close my laptop at the end of the day or even when I’m having lunch with my coworkers, few people would know that I’m an “engineer” at all. The list of things that I care about more than technology in my non work life is a mile long. Technology is a means to an end - to…

This is fine for a certain class of work, and disastrous when applied to another class of work.

To use an analogy a physician's assistant[1] doing brain surgery could be a big problem. if you need the latter. Also, you're probably overpaying if you hire the latter to administer Tylenol ...

[1]: exclude the special class of surgical PAs xD

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#188

Post by jonnycoder »

voz_ wrote: post #10

Avoid all these other types except Solver (we call it Fixer at FB). Anyone who calls themselves these things is weird, and will be hard to rely on. Disregard levels. Disregard titles. Fix what needs to be fixed. Unit tests, CI, docs, there's no such thing as grunt work. Real leadership happens in the IDE and only code matters - everything else is overhead.

I've always been a solver since I have a talent/curiosity for solving problems. I've learned that you can't always be that though especially if your organization/group values feature development. Therefore there is a balance between jumping on a problem and jumping right back to what you were doing in terms of sprint stories and development work. I've been in a group where solving high priority issues was valued at like 10% and feature work was 90% and that was a bad experience learning that hard fact late.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#189

Post by dimgl »

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…

This is 100% accurate. In fact, I think I've met a couple during my career.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#190

Post by TheDudeMan »

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…

What is the difference between code and config, other than one is well-typed?
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