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

by Tanya Reilly

A scope too broad If your scope is too broad (or undefined), there are a few possible failure modes. Lack of impact If anything can be your problem, then it’s easy for everything to become your problem, particularly if you’re in an organization with fewer senior people than it needs. There will always be another side quest: in fact, it’s all too easy to create a role that’s entirely side quests, with no real goal at all.9 Beware of spreading yourself too thin. You can end up without a narrative to your work that makes you (and whoever hired you) feel like you achieved something. Becoming a bottleneck When there’s a senior person who is seen to do everything, the convention can become that they need to be in the room for every decision. Rather than speeding up your organization, you end up slowing them down because they can’t manage without you. Decision fatigue If you escape the trap of trying to do everything, you’ll have the constant cost of deciding which things to do. I’ll talk in Chapter 4 about choosing your work. Missing relationships If you’re working with a very broad set of teams, it’s harder to have enough regular contact to build the sorts of friendly relationships that make it easier to get things done (and that make work enjoyable!). Other engineers also lose out: they don’t get the sort of mentorship and support that comes from having a “local” staff engineer involved in their work.