Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

by Will Larson

The lack of resources for senior engineers is part of a larger problem: it’s easy to lose track of what the job even is.

In most professions, folks become increasingly sure of their role as they become more senior, but it’s been my experience that many engineers lose their sense of direction after reaching their first Staff role.

Tech Leads often carry the team’s context and maintain many of the essential cross-team and cross-functional relationships necessary for the team’s success.

an organization needs roughly one Tech Lead for every eight engineers, making it far more common than other archetypes.

Some companies push for Architects to remain deep in the codebase, and others set a clear expectation that Architects must not write code: both models work for some companies.

Where most Staff-level roles require a very heavy dose of organizational wrangling, the Solver generally operates on problems that are already identified as organizational priorities and thus are called on to do relatively little org-level chiropractics.

Folks who successfully advance technology are pragmatic, deliberate, and focus more on the long-term trend of progress than viewing each individual decision as a make-or-break crisis.

You’re far more likely to change your company’s long-term trajectory by growing the engineers around you than through personal heroics.

In the long-term, companies either learn to explore, or they fade away;

One unifying theme across Staff-plus work is that the timeframes are longer.

Many technology companies describe themselves as pursuing meritocracy, defined as creating the conditions for talented employees to rise to the top naturally. Given there isn’t any widely accepted measure of individual merit, such companies come to rely on what Nelson aptly termed “informal gauges of seniority.” While these gauges are believed to evaluate ideas objectively, their sheer informality becomes a broad vector of bias and often conflate confidence with competence.

Increased organizational authority does provide new tools for solving problems, but successfully retaining organizational authority in a well-managed organization requires a great deal of nuance and restraint.

Having a vivid sense of how things ought to work is a powerful leadership tool, but it’s also essential to learn to blend your vision with the visions from your peers and leadership.

Stop spending your social capital repairing relationships frayed by conflict, and learn to collaborate with folks with different priorities and perspectives.

Only through pacing your career to your life can you sustain yourself for the long-term.

Preening is doing low-impact, high-visibility work. Many companies conflate high-visibility and high-impact so strongly that they can’t distinguish between preening and impact,

If a company’s leadership consists entirely of folks who focus their energy on performative urgency or acts of fealty, don’t be surprised when your success in the company depends on those activities.

Sometimes you’ll find work that’s worthy of attention but which an organization is incapable of paying attention to, usually because its leadership doesn’t value that work. In some companies, this is developer tooling work. In others, it’s inclusion work. In most companies, it’s glue work. There is almost always a great deal of room to do this sort of work that no one is paying attention to, so you’ll be able to make rapid initial progress on it, which feels like a good opportunity to invest. At some point, though, you’ll find that the work needs support, and it’s quite challenging to get support for work that a company is built to ignore or devalue. Your early wins will slowly get eroded by indifference and misalignment, and your initial impact will be reclaimed by the sands of time.

Teaching a company to value something it doesn’t care about is the hardest sort of work you can do, and it often fails, so you should do as little of it as you can, but no less.

Strategies are tools of proactive alignment that empower teams to move quickly and with confidence.

If you realize that you’ve rehashed the same discussion three or four times, it’s time to write a strategy.

When the future’s too hazy to identify investments worth making, it’s time to write another vision.

Particularly as you become more senior, it’s toxic to push every design to meet the bar of your own best work. Focus on pushing designs to be good, rather than fixating on your own best as the relevant quality bar.

Good strategies guide tradeoffs and explain the rationale behind that guidance. Bad strategies state a policy without explanation, which decouples them from the context they were made.

Good strategies are opinionated. If they aren’t opinionated, then they won’t provide any clarity on decision making.

As we leave behind the idea of strategy as demonstrations of brilliance, we can start to write far more of them, and we can write them more casually.

In most cases, low technical quality isn’t a crisis; it’s the expected, normal state.

At a well-run and successful company, most of your previous technical decisions won’t meet your current quality threshold.

Technical quality is a long-term game. There’s no such thing as winning, only learning and earning the chance to keep playing.

There’s the old joke about Sarbannes-Oxley: it doesn’t reduce risk; it just makes it clear who to blame when things go wrong.

Sure, you can roll out a new training program to teach your team how to write better tests, but alternatively, maybe you can just delete the one test file where 98% of test failures happen.

In theory, organizations would benefit from adopting best practices before fixing quality hot spots, but I recommend practices after hot spotting.

It’s a bit draconian, but I’ve come to believe that you ought to limit yourself to a single best practice rollout at any given time.

the worst sin of performance engineering is applying effort to unproven problems.

Interfaces are contracts between systems. Effective interfaces decouple clients from the encapsulated implementation. Durable interfaces expose all the underlying essential complexity and none of the underlying accidental complexity. Delightful interfaces are Eagerly discerning, discerningly eager.

an organization that allows any tool is an organization with uniformly unsupported tooling.

Deliberate tools create workflows that nurture habits far better than training and documentation.

How can you provide consistent architecture reviews without an articulated vision?

it’s important to establish a thoughtful approach that balances the benefits of exploration against the benefits of standardization

While you can make considerable progress on an organizational program’s informational aspects without a technical program manager; however, it’s a trap. You’ll be crushed by the coordination overhead of solo-driving a program in a large organization.

the most important thing to always remember when running your quality program is that the program isn’t the goal. The goal is to create technical quality.

Retire your remaining expectations that the company is designed to set you up for success. Now you are one of the people responsible for setting the company, your team, and your manager up for success.

As you reach this next step of leadership, you increasingly have to merge your vision with those held by more senior organizational leaders.

First, leaders have a sufficiently refined view of how things ought to work such that they can rely on their distinction between how things are and how they ought to be to identify proactive, congruent actions to narrow that gap. Second, they care enough about the gap to actually attempt those narrowing actions.

The lesson that I slowly learned was that you couldn’t be an effective long-term leader until you learn how to follow.

If there’s something you disagree with but only in a minor way, let others take the lead figuring it out.

Give your support quickly to other leaders who are working to make improvements.

continued growth requires learning to incorporate your worldview into the worldviews of those around you,

Most folks have worked with someone who thinks they’re never wrong. In each discussion, they lean in, broaden their shoulders and breach their way into the role of the decider. They’ll continue debating until their perspective wins the day or time runs out. They are often right, but right in a way that sucks the oxygen out of the room. As their tenure at a company increases, they may fancy that they’ve become very persuasive, but frequently it’s a form of persuasion characterized by the resignation of their peers.

Good questions are asked with the desire to learn, and they are specific. They sharpen the conversation. They free the answerer from the obligation to defend their position.