Staff Engineer Guide

staffeng.com

78 points·ra7··6 comments

As someone looking to end up in one of these roles over the next few years, this is very helpful!

Does something similar to this exist for engineering management or other similar high-level roles in other career fields? I'd be curious to see things like schedules for them.

Edit: also, maybe it's me, but at some point every link on every page turned purple. A little irritating; hard to tell what I have or haven't opened.

From the same author:

- His book on engineering management, An Elegant Puzzle: https://www.amazon.com/Elegant-Puzzle-Systems-Engineering-Ma...

- His blog also discusses management: https://lethain.com/

Thank you!

I read their book. It's awesome; it's essentially the only book out there I've encountered so far that actually tries to both define what the role is and teach you how to succeed.

From one of the articles on this website:

"Often abruptly, you're now expected to align the pieces around you for your own success"

I am curious to hear how people have gone about achieving this.

So as a staff eng you will have projects that you are leading but have cross team/org dependencies.

You have to get alignment with those teams and get projects on their roadmap/sprints so you can get unblocked.

But a lot of engineers think they can just ask cross-functional teams fit with but get surprised when things don’t happen. And that’s because other team is busy and not idling.

As a staff engineer you have to figure out how you can contribute to cross-team such that they agree to the problem, let you contribute to their code base, and help them unlock you.

Its a lot of championing and relationships building that is expected at staff level.

I hope that is useful

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