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

by Tanya Reilly

Your good ideas don’t get traction Being right about a need for change is less than half the battle. You’ll have to convince other people that you’re right and, even more difficult, convince them to care that you’re right. That means knowing how to build momentum within your organization: figuring out who can sponsor your idea or help it spread, and how you can get it over the finish line and make it “real.” You don’t find out about the difficult parts until you get there Many obvious-seeming journeys have some crucial point that nobody has figured out how to get past. You may be attempting to scale a cliff that’s defeated many other people before. Staff engineers can often navigate past obstacles that less experienced engineers can’t, and it’s possible that you’ll be able to succeed where others have failed. But if you know where people got stymied in the past, you can take a different path or solve the hardest part of the problem first, so other people will be convinced the project is worth their effort. Everything takes longer Unless you know how your organization works, decisions that should be straightforward will take months or quarters. The mechanics of your organization’s planning cycles will affect you too. There are times of year when it’ll be easier to make the case for staffing a new project or to rally everyone behind some goal. If you announce an initiative immediately after the quarterly engineering OKRs have been set, you’ll have a hard fight and you may ha...