Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track
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Read between January 13 - January 14, 2022
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There isn’t an explicit expectation, nor is it listed anywhere as a formal requirement, but it is understood that you’ll complete a Staff Project to get promoted. I can’t think of any Staff promotion that didn’t include a really strong project, typically a multi-person project where the engineer was the Tech Lead.
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popular recurring idea around reaching a Staff-plus role is that first, you need to successfully complete a “Staff project.”
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To bring something useful to the room… This could be details on a critical project, context from a critical team, subject matter expertise related to the room’s purpose, experience running a similar project or team at a previous company,
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You’ll be much more likely to be sponsored into the room if you’re highly aligned with your sponsor.
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Come prepared. Some companies infantilize their engineers, accepting that even very senior engineers won’t read the agenda, do the pre-reads or prepare for the discussion. There’s a considerable gap between what’s tolerated and what’s rewarded, and you’ll stand out if you take the time to organize your thoughts before each meeting.
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Focus and be present. Once you’ve entered the room, be sure to show up and engage.
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Volunteer for low-status tasks. If someone needs to take notes, raise your hand. If someone needs to follow up on action items, be available. Prioritize being usefu...
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Being flakey or not showing up regularly. There are only so many slots, and the person running the meeting will prioritize them on people who show up.
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“You’ve probably already got the technical chops, what you need to do is work on your reputation at the company.” For better or for worse, you can’t get to Staff without a good reputation.
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One of the most effective ways to get luckier is to be more visible within your organization.
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Something I haven’t talked about enough is communication and transparency. A big part of being promoted to Staff is making sure that your work is visible, that people know your name and you have a good reputation.
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Lead (and, to a lesser extent, participate in) company forums like architecture reviews, company all hands, and learning circles
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In my current role, I feel energized when someone I’ve sponsored sends an announcement that they’ve shipped their work, or when I see that I’ve helped shape or shift an engineering team’s model of an important topic.
48%
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A big part of sponsorship for me is creating the space for ICs to do the impactful work that they care about.
49%
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When I was promoted to Staff, I was fortunate to have a manager who was extremely engaged in supporting my promotion. To be honest, at the time I didn’t really understand how to write my self-reviews the right way. I wrote self-reflective development plans for what I wanted to learn over the next year instead of documenting the impact and scope of my work. My manager actually did most of the work by writing out my impact in his review.
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Is it harder to reach Staff-plus roles when working in product engineering rather than in infrastructure engineering? I do think that is the case. I also think it’s a bit easier at Stripe, where the core product is infrastructure. This means there are many opportunities within product engineering to work on projects that need to consider scale, robustness, migration path, and well-designed interfaces.
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My interests have always been aligned with what was most important for the company.
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I’m probably one of the most visible product engineers at the company, so engineers will sometimes see what I’m doing and try to pattern match on that to become a Staff-plus Engineer.
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That said, my first piece of advice to engineers is that they should avoid pattern matching in ways that lead them towards work they don’t enjoy.
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