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Comment by _dw7s | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or…

This whole recent 'staff engineer' bs is just a made-up concept to get some conference slots, write a book or two and basically talk about talking about working? I mean We've had 'staff' level engineers since forever and now someone comes along and tries to create like this aura around it and formalize what it actually 'means' to be be a staff engineer. You get to read interviews from other 'staff' engineers telling you how to properly 'staff engineer'. I mean get over yourself, you're a senior individual contributor with more responsibility. But you know, if you're not a 'staff' engineer, what are you doing with your life, right? Are you working hard enough? Do you even care about your potential? Buy my book to unlock your true 'staff' potential.

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I'm a staff SWE at Google, and while there are tons of resources and community for managers of all levels, there isn't really much of a community for senior+ ICs and TLs who don't manage.

I think this is a great development in terms of building norms and community around this very common and crucial role. I've been fairly insulated from a lot of the politics, but I'm starting to realize I need to learn a few more skills in that area.

Do you even 'staff' engineer? :))

I'm also a staff SWE (not at Google) and I find it hard to believe there are no resources for senior+ ICs in a place that's supposedly engineering-driven. I've been bombarded with 'leading without authority' and 'influence'-like trainings since forever in my current workplace...

By resources the parent comment seemed to emphasize lack of “community”, and not training.

are there equivalent communities for other roles?

At Google these trainings are almost exclusively for managers. They used to have a quarterly class for non-managers but it was always oversubscribed.

Managers have a network: lots of manager-focused meetings, trainings, perf rating calibration sessions, etc. Even if they don't work on the same projects they'll have much more interaction than ICs and TLs have which each other. ICs and TLs who work on different projects have to seek each other out, and there's no official forum for this.

leading without authority is literally a course on Google's internal training site. You can just sign up for it. I did. It was good. Later I lead a session on it, which was also fun.

The resources are certainly there at Google, but you do have to dig them up yourself. If you're a manager you're required to do them.

You've ironically proved my point - there may be resources like this, but they require much more effort to access. Furthermore, like of a mandate means that those who aren't required to take the class may not even be aware that it exists.

If you're a manager who hasn't taken Managing Within the Law or whatever, you may get in trouble, but as an IC you don't even get the option!

I don't see how this proves your point. It's like saying there is no way to get an education because no one forced you to go to university.

You can go on grow and search for "classes on leadership" or whatever else you're looking for and it will appear. It's not like you have to guess the title ahead of time. Grow is quite literally a course catalog.

There are organized programs and support at principal

Well I'll be sure to get promoted twice in order to qualify! At that level they're probably paying you upwards of $1M/year, so they'd better support you

Staff Eng is a name that the industry has coalesced around to describe a certain kind of role, and as time gone on, the industry has become more aware of.

The basic difference is only about %10-%15 of ICs are staff or greater and are engineering leadership. A staff eng in many cases is closer to a manager without people management or a PM than a typical engineer who should be spending %50-%90 of their time writing code or similar. Staff engineers also tend to work not just within their team, but are engineering leads of projects that involve multiple teams.

Some staff engineers can spend more time than typical writing code, but %80 of most staff engineers are typically not. The %20 that are still writing a lot are still usually some kind of engineering leader in their project, subfield or similar.

I wasn't really looking for an explanation, I've been doing this for a while so.. thanks, I guess. But it seems you're quite knowledgeable. Why not put this to good use and sign up as a guest on some of the staff engineer podcasts to talk about how to talk about working and cross-team synergies? I'm also curious about various flavors of staff engineering. Like senior staff for example. Do senior staff engineers wear patches or shoulder loops?

In my company staff engineers are the highest level of non-manager engineers excluding principals. It's a position above team leads reserved for engineers whose role is basically leading in stack and architectural choices that the various team apply. A staff engineer e.g. may research and implement some new i18 library that solves major pains across the org.

Stadf engineers generally require good engineering and coding skills and large domain knowledge that engineers working on few projects do not possess.

But it's also a promotion path for seniors whose job hasnt changed much in years.

Staff is really in a different level. You don't have local/team level technical challenges anymore, but more changes that run across teams and that affect multiple teams.

You need to be both technically adept, and people adept, and have some experience in multiple+ year projects or transitions and have seen both successes and failures over time.

Companies that don't cater to them in some way, (i.e. give them freedom to operate), but leave most tech. decisions to management, end up in a bad place in the long term. Most career managers are removed from day to day coding, especially at the Director level, and often miss the small details that could derail a project.

My take: Staff is seeing a resurgence, as a lot of companies are moving away from 'Team Lead' positions, which is half IC half manager positions. They see that it might be better to have a pure manager and pure IC roles, but you want to have the deep expertise of the team lead level engineers, hence the titles of Staff and Principle, which have been elevated recently.

As in always, in some companies this is another inflated title, and in some it is actually respected and has more responsibilities. It all depends from company to company.

I had never even heard the term "staff engineer" as an apparent career milestone (assumed to be ubiquitous by the author or by others as you point out) until I picked up the book Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track. It is curious to me placing so much emphasis on a title. In my first company, staff software engineer was the entry level position. It went staff engineer -> engineer -> senior engineer and then split off to principal architect or principal engineer.

We have such a "community" at my org, it is well intentioned but there's a lot of navel gazing. Linking to random engineering "leadership" blog post on slack and such.

I don't disagree with you that there is title inflation and a lot of self promotion going on, but we do need a term to describe an eng. who reports directly to the C-suite to do high accountability work with no "above my paygrade" limit (or excuse), and is not part of the main hierarchy in that he has no other eng. to answer to nor had to spend his time managing juniors. We legit need a term for this person, as it's an organizational need.

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