Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

by Will Larson

I’d already been satisfying my own personal curiosity in the area with books and papers on things like behavioral economics, behavioral science, etc, so that natural interest has helped nudge me towards where I’m at now.

For example, my previous team at Uber was generating insights into fleet utilization for capacity planning purposes, and that was a great chance to pull together my interest in machine learning and site reliability.

You know, for the first two-thirds of my career I used to love reading as much technical content as I could. I would be on YCombinator or my RSS feed all day reading about distributed systems, reliability, etc. These days I’m much more into reading about behavioral economics, behavioral science, human psychology, organizational strategy and so on.

Also, last year I started compiling a reading list of books about the human brain and behavior which I share with anyone who’s also interested in the topic(s). I do still keep up with r/linux and r/programming on Reddit, which have replaced RSS feeds for me in discovering new things to read.

Before the Payment Architecture team, I worked on building Sorbet, which is our static Ruby type checker.

The question of “allowed” is interesting, and might not be quite the right question because there were very few official policies on who got what kind of role. Most things relied on more informal gauges of seniority.

I would notice myself coming into conversations with a team and I was prepared to give them a seven year history of every time someone had attempted the thing that they’re doing and why it didn’t work. It would take deliberate effort to review that history and ask myself, “Why is this information helpful or relevant to them?”

I’m instinctively a little bit wary of this sort of idea of a staff project, in part because one of the archetypes of Staff Engineers that I’ve seen are people who don’t necessarily run grand projects themselves or do big things. But just are sort of incredibly effective gurus and routers who make the whole engineering organization run better.

One thing is that I’m a huge believer in the primacy of Conway’s Law to guide organizations’ technical architecture.

I occasionally wish I was more interested in it, because I do perceive it as a way to get a lot of power, but I fortunately have enough self awareness to believe, I think correctly, that I wouldn’t enjoy it and therefore wouldn’t be good at it.

I’m pretty voraciously curious about computing, software and architecture. I read lots of different things, and I spend more time reading links on software engineering Twitter than perhaps is healthy. It’s also been really valuable for me to cultivate a good personal network of other senior engineers. I chat with them informally about whatever it is that we’re working on and thinking about.

I’ve mostly bootstrapped this through the friends-of-friends networks of people I’ve known professionally or going all the way back to when I was in school.

I read the occasional technical paper, but it’s not something I do actively. It’s mostly when it’s referenced by someone or comes up in some other context. It’s definitely not something I make any effort to keep track of systematically or to review the recent publications. I do think that having a decent handle on the quote unquote foundational literature is really handy.

There are two big categories that I’ve seen Staff-plus engineers fall into: focus more on depth (specialist) or focus more on breadth (generalist).

At Slack, the Staff+ Engineering promotions need to have a promo package put together that illustrates with clear details and measurable information that a person operates at a certain level. The main areas of focus are: Technical Quality, Impact, Collaboration and Execution.

In general, I’ve always tried to be very intentional with my career choices and usually I spend some time every year to think about what I’m doing and the areas of growth that I want to focus on. I’ve found this extremely valuable, because it makes me take a step back and assess what I am currently doing, to ask if I’m still growing in my current environment and think about new opportunities.