The Staff Engineer's Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change

by Tanya Reilly

I’ll unpack the staff engineer role by looking at what I think of as its three pillars: big-picture thinking, execution of projects, and leveling up the engineers you work with.

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.

Someone who’s investing in being a good people manager will have less time available to stay up to date with technical developments, and anyone who is managing to stay deeply “in the weeds” will be less able to meet the needs of their reports.

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.

autonomy demands responsibility.

You’re likely to have much less influence if you’re reporting to a line manager.

It’s hard to operate in a workplace where you can do literally anything. Better to choose an area, build influence, and have some successes there. Devote your time to solving some problems entirely. Then, if you’re ready to, move on to a different area.

How much autonomy will I have? Will I feel included? Will it be safe to make mistakes? Will I be part of the decisions that affect me? How difficult will it be to make progress on my projects? Are people…you know…nice?

Everything you commit to has an opportunity cost. By choosing to do one thing, you’re implicitly choosing not to do another.

If you allocate 100% of your time and something unexpected happens, your choices are to drop something or run beyond capacity.

the most interesting technology and enjoyable coworkers might not compensate for feeling that you’re doing harm in the world.

if you’re a fan of some technology and advocate for it in every single situation, people will stop believing you know what you’re talking about.

If you’re polite (even to annoying people), communicate clearly, and stay calm in stressful situations, other people will trust you to be the adult in the room.

You will build credibility as a professional every time you take on a chaotic situation and make it easier for everyone else to understand.

Being the least skilled person on a team of superstars will teach you more than being the best person on an otherwise mediocre team.

What makes a great project lead? It’s rarely genius: it’s perseverance, courage, and a willingness to talk to other people.

usually, the reason a project is difficult isn’t that you’re pushing the boundaries of technology, it’s that you’re dealing with ambiguity: unclear direction; messy, complicated humans; or legacy systems whose behavior you can’t predict.

the clearest indicator of what the company values is what gets people promoted. No matter how much your organization claims to encourage collaboration and teamwork, that message will be undermined if any staff engineers get to that level through “heroic” solitary efforts.

If you’re mature, constructive, and accountable, you’re telling your new grads that’s what a senior engineer does. If you’re condescending, impossible to please, or never available, that’s what a senior engineer does, too. You shape your company every day, just by how you behave.

No matter how good your leadership, you can’t be a technical leader without the “technical” part.

Never, ever accept a managerial role until you are already solidly senior as an engineer. To me this means at least seven years or more writing and shipping code; definitely, absolutely no less than five.

If you have a vast repository of knowledge and everyone’s afraid to ask you anything, your knowledge will stay in your own head.

“We talk about the meritocracy of Silicon Valley, when really it’s a mirrortocracy, as people tend to hire people who look like themselves at greater rates than other sectors.”

If you can delegate, you’ll be able to take responsibility for bigger, more difficult problems, handing off parts of them to the rest of your group. The more your colleagues can do, the more you can do.