Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

by Will Larson

This is a feeling I’ve always felt throughout my career; I enjoy the success of my peers as much as I do my own.

Often industry peers tend to make the case that titles don’t matter. But I disagree 100% with this statement; my personal experiences and observations across the companies that I’ve worked at have shown me otherwise.

my strength around building relationships across the company is an important skill to have since the people / social aspects of engineering don’t go away; in fact, they are key to getting anything done.

first, effectively setting technical direction for other engineers; second, mentoring them and developing their talent as a consequence of the work you’re structuring for them.

Communication and building narratives are key. Make sure to write … A LOT.

When you have a title, you don’t have to spend so much energy putting your credentials on the table. It helps set the context for others. You’re more respected from the outset, and that’s been really noticeable. You also get access to executives, so you get information earlier and might have a seat at the table to influence things.

The thing that springs to mind is to find your peers or support network. Just like management, it gets lonely the higher up you go and it’s important to find peers that will still challenge you and you can brainstorm ideas with.

It’s kind of a running joke in engineering but a lot of people get into this profession because they don’t like talking to people but to be effective at your job as a Staff Engineer, you’re likely going to spend a lot of your time talking to people.

at a lot of companies, the management track is a lot less vague than the engineering track.

I personally only know a handful of other Frontend-specific staff engineers, and I think that frontend as a skillset is not valued in the industry as much as I think that it should be.

frontend-leaning folks make great Staff Engineers, because they’re so used to constantly thinking about users and how users are going to interact with what they build. User empathy is a superpower that frontend people bring to the table.

I think a lot of what gets someone to Staff is noticing problems and acting on solving them proactively, instead of letting them go.

Especially being a remote, I think that unless you’re proactive a lot of your work can go unnoticed

You’re always going to be your best advocate, but that’s even more true as a remote. You have to put a lot of effort into making sure your accomplishments are out there and they’re known.

Having the title strongly correlates with one’s ability to influence the organization/company roadmap and priorities - basically you get to be in the “room where it happens”.

As a Staff+ engineer you do need many of the core management skills, even though you are not a manager and I have found reading management books extremely helpful.

when I was more junior, I would often just assume that something was someone else’s problem. Now, it’s all my problem.

If you do really great work, but no one knows about it, when it comes time for promotion, you’ll be passed over.

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

Writing software is a totally different domain, but it feels like the sentiment fits into some tenet that I really value about communicating: having an understanding in your head is half the battle - being able to express that understanding is just as hard and valuable.