# The Staff Engineer's Path  ## Metadata - Author: [[Tanya Reilly]] - Full Title: The Staff Engineer's Path - Category: #books ## Highlights - Big-picture thinking Big-picture thinking means being able to step back and take a broader view. It means seeing beyond the immediate details and understanding the context that you’re working in. It also means thinking beyond the current time, whether that means initiating yearlong projects, building software that will be easy to decommission, or predicting what your company will need in three years.5 Execution At the staff level, the projects you take on will become messier and more ambiguous. They’ll involve more people and need more political capital, influence, or culture change to succeed. Leveling up Every increase in seniority comes with more responsibility for raising the standards and skills of the engineers within your orbit, whether that’s your local team, colleagues in your organization, or engineers across your whole company or industry. This responsibility will include intentional influence through teaching and mentoring, as well as the accidental influence that comes from being a role model. ([Location 157](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=157)) - Technical skills are the foundation of every staff engineer role, and you’ll keep exercising them. ([Location 186](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=186)) - No matter how deep or arcane your technical knowledge, you’ll find that work gets less annoying when you can persuade other people to adopt your ideas, level up the engineers around you, and breeze through the organizational gridlock that slows everyone down. ([Location 241](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=241)) - Joel (who came up with the idea that humaning skills are “flying buttresses”), ([Location 294](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=294)) ## New highlights added February 5, 2024 at 8:24 PM - Staff engineers are role models. Managers may be responsible for setting culture on their teams, enforcing good behavior, and ensuring standards are met. But engineering norms are set by the behavior of the most respected engineers on the project. ([Location 542](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=542)) - At senior level, maybe your manager advised you on which problems were important to solve, and left it to you to figure out what to do about it. At staff+ levels, your manager should be bringing you information and sharing context, but you should be telling them what’s important just as much as the other way around. As Sabrina Leandro, principal engineer at Intercom, asks, “So you know you’re supposed to be working on things that are impactful and valuable. But where do you find this magic backlog of high-impact work that you should be doing?” Her answer: “You create it!” ([Location 650](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=650)) - Your locator map can help you make sure the teams you work with really understand their purpose in the organization, who their customers are, and how their work affects other people. Your topographical map can help highlight the friction and gaps between teams and open up the paths of communication. Your treasure map can help you make sure everyone knows exactly what they’re trying to achieve and why. ([Location 1088](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=1088)) ## New highlights added February 14, 2024 at 8:05 AM - Some organizations, particularly in academia and in big and old companies, have a clear hierarchy: the same group of people, in the same configuration, climb the ranks together and have a fairly fixed structure for communicating, making decisions, and allocating the “good projects.” Each person is like a node in a crystal lattice: so long as the people around you are moving up, you’ll move up too. Senior people in groups like this will often say that they never looked for promotion: they stayed where they were, got a project, got support from the group, and got the promotion when it was their turn. ([Location 1471](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=1471)) - Practice the skills of intentionally looking for a bigger picture and seeing what’s happening. Understand your work in context: know your customers, talk with peers outside your group, understand your success metrics, and be clear on what’s actually important. Know how your organization works and how decisions get made within it. Build or discover paths to allow information you need to come to you. Be clear about what goals everyone is aiming for. Think about your own work and what your journey is. ([Location 1907](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=1907)) ## New highlights added February 15, 2024 at 8:06 AM - Bear in mind that getting people to agree isn’t a chore that stands in between you and the real work of solving the problem: the agreement is the work. ([Location 2234](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=2234)) - Creating something that feels “obvious” can feel anticlimactic when you’re writing it: we’d all love to show up with a genius visionary idea and save the USS Enterprise! But usually what’s needed is someone who’s willing to weigh up all of the possible solutions, make the case for what to do and not do, align everyone, and be brave enough to make the (potentially wrong!) decision. ([Location 2270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=2270)) ## New highlights added March 1, 2024 at 10:34 PM - can you imagine a little dashboard for yourself (Figure 4-6), showing your current levels of various needs? Imagine it includes five resources: energy, credibility, quality of life, skills, and social capital. ([Location 3130](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=3130)) ## New highlights added April 1, 2024 at 3:53 AM - The first is by deliberately setting out to learn something: you take a class, buy a book, or hack on a toy project. While this kind of structured learning can often happen at work, you may struggle to find time for it, and find it spilling into your free time. The second way is by working closely with someone who is really skilled. Being the least skilled person on a team of superstars will teach you more than being the best person on an otherwise mediocre team. When you work with great people, it’s almost impossible to avoid becoming greater yourself. The third way—and the most common, I think—is learning by doing. You get better at what you spend time on. If there’s a skill you want to hone, the easiest way to practice it will be to take on projects that need that skill. ([Location 3234](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=3234)) ## New highlights added April 1, 2024 at 12:52 PM - In general, work that matters to the people in your reporting chain is work that builds social capital. ([Location 3467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=3467)) - You won’t succeed unless you can defend your time. The number of demands on it will increase and the number of available hours will stay the same, so be deliberate about what you prioritize.20 And, when you choose a project, make sure you have enough of the resources you’ll need to do a good job. ([Location 3707](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=3707)) ## New highlights added April 2, 2024 at 12:53 AM - But, in the words of my friend Polina Giralt, “that feeling of discomfort is called learning”. Managing the discomfort is a skill you can learn. ([Location 3835](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=3835)) - Part of your job will be to remove stress for them, making this a project that will give them quality of life, skills, energy, credibility, and social capital. ([Location 3886](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=3886)) - If you skipped Chapter 2, just imagine teams and organizations as tectonic plates moving against each other, with friction and instability where the plates meet. ([Location 4758](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=4758)) ## New highlights added April 9, 2024 at 8:36 PM - Who doesn’t love a good bikeshed discussion! The expression “bikeshedding” came from C. Northcote Parkinson’s 1957 “Law of Triviality”, which holds that since it’s much easier to discuss a trivial issue than a difficult one, that’s where teams tend to spend their time.15 ([Location 4587](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=4587)) - When you’re having difficulties, remember that you are not the only person who wants your project to succeed.17 Your manager’s job is to make you successful, and your director’s job is to make your organization successful. If you’re not telling them you need help, it’s going to be harder for them to do their jobs. Some people really resist asking for help. ([Location 4736](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=4736)) - Our team motto became “lack of planning on your part is not an emergency on mine.”2 ([Location 4986](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=4986)) - Software consultant Glen Mailer says he looks for ways to make it as easy as possible for people to remember to do the right thing. ([Location 6907](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=6907)) - As Bryan Liles says, “How you can get pushed up is by building a whole bench behind you.” ([Location 7086](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=7086)) - You can help your colleagues by providing advice, teaching, guardrails, or opportunities. Understand what’s most helpful for the specific situation. Think about whether you want to help one-on-one, level up your team, or influence further. Offer your experience and advice, but make sure it’s welcome. Writing and public speaking can send your message further. Teach through pairing, shadowing, review, and coaching. Teaching classes or writing codelabs can scale your teaching time. Guardrails can let people work autonomously. Offer review, or be a project guardrail for your colleagues. Codify guardrails using processes, automation, and culture change. Opportunities can be much more valuable than advice. Think about who you’re sponsoring and delegating to. Share the spotlight in your team. Plan to give away your job. ([Location 7090](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=7090)) - I love author and “recovering awkward person” Vanessa Van Edwards’s Science of People website for learning some of this “humaning” magic that other people seem to have been born knowing how to do. Check out her article “How to Network”, for example, for tips on talking to people at events like where to stand, how to remember people’s names, and what to talk about. All of this stuff is learnable.3 ([Location 7283](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=7283)) - Here are some other reasons it’s good to spend a long time in one place: Feedback loops Staying in one place for longer gives you the feedback loop that comes from seeing the consequences of your actions. When engineers move around a lot, everyone’s seeing the results of someone else’s past decisions instead of the outcomes of their own. You may also get to see the colleagues you leveled up become senior or staff engineers and then become role models themselves. Depth The more you know a single domain or a single stack, the deeper and more nuanced your understanding will get. It takes time to intuitively understand something so well that you can build on the knowledge. It’s also faster to do things you’ve done before; you’ll be able to make progress more quickly. Relationships You’ve invested time in knowing people all over the organization, and you have people you trust and enjoy working with. You’ve built up enough mutual goodwill that even the biggest technical disagreements are collegial, not heated. That’s an asset that takes time to build up again. Context After investing time and effort into learning how to navigate your organization, you have a skill set that might not translate to another one. You’ve figured out the OKR process, you know the shadow org chart, and you know how to get things done. Familiarity You know the work, the schedule, and the people. If you observe particular religious holidays, pick your kid up from school every afternoon, or you always play bocce at lunchtime on Thursdays, you’ve ([Location 7407](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=7407)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Reasons to move But there are also good reasons you might want to move around at intervals: Employability If you stay at one place for a very long time, you might be learning how to work in that culture rather than learning transferable skills. The world outside can shift, and you can get left behind. Keeping more skills and domains fresh can keep more doors open. Experiences There will be a limited number of experiences available in any one place, and a limited number of people to learn from. Once you’ve collected everything available, you might be ready for something new. Growth It can sometimes be easier to get a step up in level or scope by changing jobs. Maybe the next level feels too far out of reach to be realistic, or involves the kind of politics or work you’re just not interested in. If you’re struggling to get your name in the ring for the important, challenging, or visible projects where you are, it can be easier to find a new job than get a promotion you’re hoping for. Money Changing jobs can be the fast track to higher salaries. While some companies stay up to date with their current employees, often new hires can negotiate better salaries, stock grants, and hiring bonuses. Mismatch Not all paths to growth exist at all companies. If you’re looking to become an industry expert on a topic your organization doesn’t really need an expert ([Location 7423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=7423)) - In a famous article, Charity Majors introduced what she calls the engineer/manager pendulum, the idea of deliberately moving back and forth between manager and IC roles every few years. Majors rejects the idea that you have to choose a lane and stay there: The best frontline eng managers in the world are the ones that are never more than 2-3 years removed from hands-on work, full time down in the trenches. The best individual contributors are the ones who have done time in management. And the best technical leaders in the world are often the ones who do both. Back and forth. Like a pendulum. Majors emphasizes that management should never be seen as a promotion—it’s a change of profession with a different set of skills to learn. There should be no change in status when you go from people leadership to technical leadership or vice versa: each will build a separate set of skills, and will enhance the skills on the other side. But she doesn’t recommend trying to do both at once: “You can only really improve at one of these things at a time: engineering or management.” ([Location 7527](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=7527)) - Molly Graham (of the “give away your legos” article I mentioned last chapter!) says that careers come in two phases: first learning what your strengths are, and then finding “holes that are shaped like you.” “Happiness,” Graham says, “is going to come from finding roles that fall in the intersection of what you love doing and what you are great at.” ([Location 7599](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BG16Y553&location=7599))