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Comment by princevegeta89 | Hacker News Reader

As a staff engineer at my company, my stupid manager expects me to do his work all the time. I'm hardly building things but just managing jira, talking to other teams, managing shit, writing docs, dealing with politics etc. I never signed up for this crap. But sadly this is where many companies are going

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“Staff engineer” varies by employer but this is generally exactly what I expect it to be.

There are times I do technical work and times my entire job is putting out fires and making sure the wheels stay on the bus as we barrel full speed to a release. Making sure people have work. Making sure they know what it is, and the customer is on board. Tracking deadlines. Managing expectations. Making critical decisions about the architecture and the like.

Any developer can write code. This stuff requires a different set of executive functions, and engineers that can do both are generally promoted.

> making sure the wheels stay on the bus as we barrel full speed to a release. Making sure people have work. Making sure they know what it is, and the customer is on board. Tracking deadlines. Managing expectations

What you're describing is a manager, not an engineer. Do you have any managers in your company? What is their job?

No, what he is describing is a well-rounded staff level engineer. As you get more senior and take on more responsibilities, you start having to think about everyone's work and how it all fits together, you think about how the project fits into a product that meets the customer's need (unless you have a dedicated PM, which is becoming rare), you have to think about deadlines and how the project is tracking towards it, you have to think about other teams and how their work intersects and how their dependencies are timed to ship in time for yours, you need to communicate up the totem pole to actual managers. And, yes, you have to hold your nose and open up Jira.

I don't know where these "pure" perfectly spherical software engineers work who are super-senior staff level, but still do nothing but type in code. I've never seen them. As soon as you advance beyond the entry-level, you need to broaden your scope and be more of an actual engineer rather than just someone who writes code.

The manager's job is (among others) to make sure the team is working well together, solve any inter-personnel issues, work with each of their directs on career development, sometimes provide direction of what to work on, sometimes actually assign individual tasks, pass down announcements and direction from the higher-ups, help to manage the team members' performance, and work with HR when needed. They're not there to do all the stinky non-code-typing things in your project.

No, Staffs are suppose to be focused on the technical implementation of the product, not on the minute of everyone’s work. Most of what you describe are EMs. Staff/Sr Staff/Principals should be steering the high level architecture, tech debt refactoring, migration strategy, etc and still get in the weeds to implement said architectures. They have the technical experience to do it, trying to extinguish that experience by pushing them into administrative roles is a complete waste of their talent and experience.

They’re being pushed until these administrative roles because Directors have no idea how to leverage their talent and default to putting them into EM-like roles because that’s what they do but again, it’s a waste of talent and experience.

I've been working in the industry for huge, medium and small companies for 25+ years and have never seen a purely technical role above "Senior" level. Open to the idea that they may exist, but I think you're describing some kind of theoretical ideal that is rare in reality.

I’ve worked at multiple orgs where this is actually the case. Not sure what to say other than they exist and I hope you can work at a place like that one day, it’s awesome.

I used to work at a place where I could do things of value, but my role has changed to putting out fires that are (to my eye) manufactured by our acquiring company and silly admin things that I have now responsibility of, but no agency in. Ex: they need me to do a performance review of my reports, but don’t let me give them the rating or raise I think they deserve despite the decision makers never having a single conversation with my reports.

Nobody knows our codebase as well as me because I built it. My output of customer value has dropped to 10% of what it used to be and I don’t think it would be possible today to build the things we built pre-acquisition that made us valuable in the first place.

Thankfully we were able to hire another engineer who is very good and has been able to keep up with internal and external requests. I am thankful he’s been able to get up to speed so I don’t leave my coworkers high and dry.

At 35 years old, I’m cooked, Chat. Thriving at a megacorp with these management styles is orthogonal to delivering value to customers.

> They’re being pushed until these administrative roles because Directors have no idea how to leverage their talent and default to putting them into EM-like roles

I think the explanation is simpler, I suspect it's just many people have a desire to be in a different role or multiple roles. Also, successful generalists tend to think everyone should be a generalist. That's why they muddle the role descriptions in their heads.

Don't you have any product or project manager people in your company? As someone else said, you're (somewhat) describing an EM but there are other types of managers as well.

It seems managers are simultaneously worthless pointy-haired bosses and yet needed to keep self-described elite devs from doing work that's beneath them.

Schroedinger's manager.

> Making sure people have work. Making sure they know what it is, and the customer is on board. Tracking deadlines. Managing expectations. Making critical decisions about the architecture and the like.

What is the team's manager doing if not coordination, allocation, and tracking?

Have yet to be convinced that staff eng is worth it. Seems like it is [project] management by another name and placed at the top of the IC ladder so as to suggest that maybe, just maybe, you'll get time to actually write code.

IMO Staff Eng and line managers are both jobs where you may not write a lot of code, but the ability to write code is nevertheless a critical skill for the job.

I’m not sure the C Suite realizes that their efficiency drives — getting rid of managers — often means their engineers now aren’t as free to focus on engineering things.

They don't care, their goal is to hit the numbers for their bonuses. Once dev collapses, they've moved on to make another company "efficient."

My manager mostly just asks everyone if "it'll be done today" and tries to constantly subdivide tasks as infinitum (never read the mythical man month)

The reality is (and not in defence id managers) managers are getting just as effed by "leadership" (ever notice how managers are framed as scumbags but leaders are saviors?) and sadly managers cannot tell employees - "hey mate we are all in the same boat getting effed so let us game it/survive it together" for fear of being outed as non company players. You are always supposed to sell the company as your own line! So they are squeezed from the top and the bottom. I keep switching between management and IC so I have a bit of empathy here.

Oh I totally see through that, true. It's obviously from the very top. I'm looking to switch to management for the first time for the empathy bit, myself.

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