At this level, your goal is to solve problems efficiently, and programming will often not be the best use of your time. It may make more sense for you to take on the design or leadership work that only you can do and let others handle the programming. Staff engineers often take on ambiguous, messy, difficult problems and do just enough work on them to make them manageable by someone else. Once the problem is tractable, it becomes a growth opportunity for less experienced engineers (sometimes with support from the staff engineer). For some staff engineers, deep diving through codebases will
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