# Staff Engineer  ## Metadata - Author: [[Will Larson and Tanya Reilly]] - Full Title: Staff Engineer - Category: #books ## Highlights - Success will often mean interpreting business needs, communicating a clear direction, defusing a looming crisis, convincing teams to agree on tradeoffs, or just being a good influence. ([Location 59](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08RMSHYGG&location=59)) - This book standardizes on the most common sequence of titles: going from Senior to Staff, followed by Principal, and then Distinguished. It uses the term Staff-plus as an overarching label for Staff, Principal, and Distinguished titles. ([Location 121](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08RMSHYGG&location=121)) - The four common archetypes of Staff-plus roles I encountered are: The Tech Lead guides the approach and execution of a particular team. They partner closely with a single manager, but sometimes they partner with two or three managers within a focused area. Some companies also have a Tech Lead Manager role, which is similar to the Tech Lead archetype but exists on the engineering manager ladder and includes people management responsibilities. The Architect is responsible for the direction, quality, and approach within a critical area. They combine in-depth knowledge of technical constraints, user needs, and organization level leadership. The Solver digs deep into arbitrarily complex problems and finds an appropriate path forward. Some focus on a given area for long periods. Others bounce from hotspot to hotspot as guided by organizational leadership. The Right Hand extends an executive’s attention, borrowing their scope and authority to operate particularly complex organizations. They provide additional leadership bandwidth to leaders of large-scale organizations. ([Location 149](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08RMSHYGG&location=149)) - setting and editing technical direction, providing sponsorship and mentorship, injecting engineering context into organizational decisions, exploration, and what Tanya Reilly calls being glue. ([Location 242](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08RMSHYGG&location=242)) - This leaves you with a choice between shifting right to hard and high-impact or shifting down to easy and low-impact. The latter choice–easy and low-impact–is what Walk refers to as snacking. ([Location 457](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08RMSHYGG&location=457)) - There’s a well-worn model of genius encapsulated in the Feynman algorithm: “1) Write down a problem. 2) Think very hard. 3) Write down the solution.” ([Location 1089](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08RMSHYGG&location=1089)) - communicating with executives can be unexpectedly difficult for a less apparent reason: the executive has become accustomed to consuming reality preprocessed in a particular way. ([Location 1200](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08RMSHYGG&location=1200)) - For example, some executives have an extraordinary talent for pattern matching. Their first instinct in any presentation is to ask a series of detailed, seemingly random questions until they can pattern match against their previous experience. ([Location 1204](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08RMSHYGG&location=1204)) - Controlling the sequence in which you present your ideas is the single most important act necessary to clear writing. The clearest sequence is always to give the summarizing idea before you give the individual ideas being summarized. I cannot emphasize this point too much. ([Location 1221](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08RMSHYGG&location=1221)) - SCQA format: Situation: what is the relevant context? Example: We’ve been falling behind our competition in shipping product features for two years. Last year, we doubled our engineering team but shipped fewer features than the year before. Complication: why is the current situation problematic? Example: We plan to double our engineering team again this year, but based on last year’s experience, we think that will decrease velocity further while significantly increasing our organizational budget. Question: what is the core question to address? Example: Should we keep moving forward with our plan to double engineering this year? Answer: what is your best answer to the posed question? Example: We should stop hiring for the next six months and focus on gelling our existing team. Based on progress at that point, we should refresh our hiring plan for the remainder of the year. ([Location 1224](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08RMSHYGG&location=1224)) - Aligning with stakeholders before your presentation, sometimes called nemawashi, is extremely effective at reducing surprises. ([Location 1241](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08RMSHYGG&location=1241)) - Don’t present a question without an answer. ([Location 1259](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08RMSHYGG&location=1259)) - Charity Majors has a fantastic blog post on this topic that I recommend reading: “The Engineer/Manager Pendulum”. Charity argues that “manager career path vs engineering career path” is a false dichotomy, and taking time to alternate between both roles makes you better at both. ([Location 1318](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08RMSHYGG&location=1318)) - There are only a few magic spells to attain a Staff-plus role: negotiate for the title while switching roles or find a supportive environment to “bake in place” while building your internal credibility with an empowered sponsor who’ll advocate for you. The most important reagent in both spells is picking the right company to perform them at. ([Location 1718](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08RMSHYGG&location=1718)) - One that’s particularly important is understanding if the company’s leadership fundamentally subscribes to an exception-heavy “meritocratic” view of the world or a consistency-heavy “proceduralist” view. ([Location 1734](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08RMSHYGG&location=1734)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - The easiest sponsors to find are folks who you’ve worked with before. The flying wedge pattern of one senior leader joining a company and then bringing on their previous coworkers is a well-known and justifiably-despised pattern that relies on this built-in referrer-as-sponsor, but it doesn’t have to be toxic if done sparingly. ([Location 1775](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08RMSHYGG&location=1775))