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How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer
31–40 of 188 posts
Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer
#32I worked at the Staff level for a while, I think the key is to report to a director who manages managers. Every time I did I had a good time, projects were easy to define and people were easy to convince. I had the same level with a few managers who were managing other ICs, and that never worked. Other ICs try to compete on tasks, people don't come to you with their needs, you learn about different projects often too late, other teams are territorial and don't really want you to intervene.
Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer
#33[deleted]
Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer
#34> “How do you find problems worth working on?”
They usually find me.
Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer
#35It'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
Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer
#36The 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 think it was correlated with outsourcing and H1B replacements, because you can’t outsource the leadership required for bottom-up methods.
Further, foreign business culture is significantly more too-down than American business culture.
Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer
#37The 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…
I think that's a completely natural source of frustration for someone who is used to being able to put hands to keyboard and solve problems quickly, but IMO the higher you climb the ladder, the more you have the opportunity and responsibility to take a longer view and to delegate - which often means that other people are pushing the code.
Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer
#38[deleted]
Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer
#39Funny 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…
I think this is more relevant reality. At Staff and Principal you have visibility into a lot of fires going around you. What helps is understanding the relative importance of what fire to douse and be at peace with the ones that you cannot control.
Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer
#40TL;DR is that its extremely hard to show staff level expertise if you work at a wrong company. And the amount of companies that still need this expertise is ever decreasing (big corpos with a lot of autonomy)
This is the real reason why we dont see natural path for more ppl to progress towards Staff level.
Interestingly noone talks about this. “Be first or bust”