21–30 of 55 posts
> "Do not share a half-assed draft." It turns out that an important soft skill is knowing how to make these kinds of drafts work in your favor, especially with internal stakeholders, by doing drafts that are annotated with where you want help and input. As one example, "We want to work on the foobar because [get exact wording from team] to improve throughput [%]. We will request [#] team members for the next [n] mont…
I have observed that a Staff engineer has mastered these three skills: Communication, Adaptability, Challenging Situation Management Normalize being just a really productive IC. Not everyone wants to spend their energy on these facets of a job; some folks just want to build awesome stuff -- and that should be fine.
Nah, you're supposed to play PM and manager so those people can do less than nothing.
I’m constantly torn by the natural inclination to climb the ladder and enjoy the financial rewards, but I have little interest in the day-to-day tasks of my staff engineer coworkers (mostly sitting in meetings and writing emails, very rarely writing code because that’s considered beneath their pay grade and they’d likely be chastised for it at my company). If I had a family to provide for, I think it would be a much…
On the contrary, I find that the first or second line of managers above ICs is almost always insufficiently compensated to offset the extra hours/stress/bullshit.
It's not just being able to communicate, you need to adopt a persona. As a more experienced engineer that is actually extremely passionate about my work, the difference in the way I'm treated when I adopt a calm, cool persona speaking with a calm voice vs being excited, passionate, and appearing happy is significant. I can communicate the same idea effectively using both personas but being detached, calm and cool jus…
I have observed that a Staff engineer has mastered these three skills: Communication, Adaptability, Challenging Situation Management Normalize being just a really productive IC. Not everyone wants to spend their energy on these facets of a job; some folks just want to build awesome stuff -- and that should be fine.
A student publishing their first paper was remiss that their name was only one among many. Their mentor said, “That only matters if this is the only paper you ever write. Publish a lot of papers, and you won’t care for the placement of your name among any single one.”
The point is to do a lot of teamwork. You can scale yourself and others that way. I like to think that the job of an IC is more “make software happen” than “write all the software on your own”.
I have observed that a Staff engineer has mastered these three skills: Communication, Adaptability, Challenging Situation Management Normalize being just a really productive IC. Not everyone wants to spend their energy on these facets of a job; some folks just want to build awesome stuff -- and that should be fine.
I have observed that a Staff engineer has mastered these three skills: Communication, Adaptability, Challenging Situation Management Normalize being just a really productive IC. Not everyone wants to spend their energy on these facets of a job; some folks just want to build awesome stuff -- and that should be fine.
I think it's unwise to dismiss soft skills as getting in the way of that goal. As responsibility increases, and the complexity of your work increases, you'll have to lead people at some point. You can absolutely remain an überproductive IC forever, but you will cap out on what you can achieve -- and most importantly, what you can control -- by virtue of almost all great accomplishments being realized by more than one…
For a Staff+ Engineer, aside from being an excellent IC, I'd make the case that there's only one primary skill (from which several others follow) at which they must excel: they must be able to write, write well, and write prodigiously because this is the most important form of communication within an engineering team.
I have observed that a Staff engineer has mastered these three skills: Communication, Adaptability, Challenging Situation Management Normalize being just a really productive IC. Not everyone wants to spend their energy on these facets of a job; some folks just want to build awesome stuff -- and that should be fine.
I’m constantly torn by the natural inclination to climb the ladder and enjoy the financial rewards, but I have little interest in the day-to-day tasks of my staff engineer coworkers (mostly sitting in meetings and writing emails, very rarely writing code because that’s considered beneath their pay grade and they’d likely be chastised for it at my company). If I had a family to provide for, I think it would be a much…
> If I had a family to provide for, I think it would be a much easier decision to take the money. On the contrary, I find that the first or second line of managers above ICs is almost always insufficiently compensated to offset the extra hours/stress/bullshit.
Fully agree on the incremental amount of excess bullshit, though. :)