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

by Tanya Reilly

Yonatan Zunger, distinguished engineer at Twitter, describes the four disciplines that are needed in any job in the world: Core technical skills Coding, litigation, producing content, cooking—whatever a typical practitioner of the role works on Product management Figuring out what needs to be done and why, and maintaining a narrative about that work Project management The practicalities of achieving the goal, removing chaos, tracking the tasks, noticing what’s blocked, and making sure it gets unblocked People management Turning a group of people into a team, building their skills and careers, mentoring, and dealing with their problems Zunger notes that the higher your level, the less your mix of these skills corresponds with your job title: “The more senior you get, the more this becomes true, the more and more there is an expectation that you can shift across each of these four kinds of jobs easily and fluidly, and function in all rooms.” Every team and every project needs all four of these skills. As a staff engineer, you’ll use all of them. You don’t need to be amazing at all of them, though.