As a staff engineer, you’ll likely have opinions on a bunch of things (as in Figure 4-11) you haven’t been invited to help with. If you see a project that’s going in a dangerous direction, or you have ideas about how to make it better, you might nudge your way in and have some conversations. Meddling can be very welcome, or very much the opposite. Make sure you’re not “lobbing a water balloon”: getting involved long enough to cause chaos, then disengaging without sticking around to experience the consequences of your changes.
