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

by Tanya Reilly

It’ll be harder to keep everyone going in the same direction If the team doesn’t know the big plan, either they’ll go to the wrong place, or every decision will be long, complicated, and full of discussion. Sometimes navigating around difficulties will mean taking an indirect path. Everyone should be very clear about the course correction that will need to come after that milestone. You won’t finish big things If your team keeps focusing on short-term projects to solve local problems and pain points, you won’t be able to solve bigger, long-term problems that take multiple steps. The value of your existing projects might not be clear to people outside the team either. You’ll accumulate cruft If teams don’t know where they’re going, they have two options. They can try to be flexible enough to support every future state, creating solutions that are overcomplicated and hard to maintain. Or they can make local decisions, taking the risk that their direction won’t match everyone else’s and that their solution will be a weird edge case that everyone else has to work around. You’ll have competing initiatives In an organization that relies on grassroots or bottom-up initiatives, there might be multiple people trying to rally enthusiasm around completely different directions. They’re all trying to do the right thing and get people aligned, but the end result is chaos. Engineers stop growing Focusing only on short-term goals limits the way you think about and frame your work, and how...