Staff Engineer Quotes

“As our industry matures and tackles ever-bigger problems, more and more companies are recognising the need for engineers who have “seen some things”
― Will Larson, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

“Trust metrics over intuition. You should have a way to measure every project. Quality is a complex system, the sort of place where your intuition can easily deceive you. Similarly, as you become more senior at your company, your experience will no longer reflect most other folks’ experiences. You already know about the rough edges, and you’ll be the first person in line to get help if you find a new one, but most other folks don’t. Metrics keep you honest.”
― Will Larson, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

“Controlling the sequence in which you present your ideas is the single most important act necessary to clear writing. The clearest sequence is always to give the summarizing idea before you give the individual ideas being summarized. I cannot emphasize this point too much.”
― Will Larson, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

“managers just don’t always know how to support their most senior engineers. How can you be sure your reports are working on the right things, when they’re expected to advise you on the most important problems rather than the other way around?”
― Will Larson, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

“good piece of written communication is the most effective means of broadcasting ideas and scaling yourself.”
― Will Larson, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

“Freedom from the cycle of re-establishing one’s competence came up frequently as a key advantage of the Staff title. These informal gauges weren’t mentioned by every Staff”
― Will Larson, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

“Being a Staff-engineer is not just a role. It’s the intersection of the role, your behaviors, your impact, and the organization’s recognition of all those things.”
― Will Larson, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

“When you have a strong enough worldview to lead, you’ll start to collect others around you who rely on you maintaining that world’s physics, and tolerating any deviation from your vision can feel like you’re letting them down.”
― Will Larson, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

“Trusting other people and giving them the freedom to make technical decisions (even ones that you disagree with!), understanding other people’s motivations, learning to give difficult feedback, knowing when to pick your battles - these are all useful skills to have.”
― Will Larson, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

“If you can’t resist the urge to include your most brilliant ideas in the process, then you can include them in your prework. Write all of your best ideas in a giant document, delete it, and never mention any of them again. Now that those ideas are out of your head, your head is cleared for the work ahead.”
― Will Larson, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

“Indeed, that’s the only viable long-term bet on your career: focus on work that matters, do projects that develop you, and steer towards companies that value genuine experience.”
― Will Larson, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

“When I spoke with Keavy McMinn, one interesting point she made was that sometimes it’s helpful to be able to see things without the full historical context. Did you ever find that your context made it harder to move forward? Absolutely. I would notice myself coming into conversations with a team and I was prepared to give them a seven year history of every time someone had attempted the thing that they’re doing and why it didn’t work. It would take deliberate effort to review that history and ask myself, “Why is this information helpful or relevant to them?”
― Will Larson, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

“A coworker once told me the story of someone determined to make their name in Business Development,”
― Will Larson, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

“Sometimes you’ll find work that’s worthy of attention but which an organization is incapable of paying attention to, usually because its leadership doesn’t value that work. In some companies, this is developer tooling work. In others, it’s inclusion work. In most companies, it’s glue work. There is almost always a great deal of room to do this sort of work that no one is paying attention to, so you’ll be able to make rapid initial progress on it, which feels like a good opportunity to invest. At some point, though, you’ll find that the work needs support, and it’s quite challenging to get support for work that a company is built to ignore or devalue. Your early wins will slowly get eroded by indifference and misalignment, and your initial impact will be reclaimed by the sands of time.”
― Will Larson, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

“Success will often mean interpreting business needs, communicating a clear direction, defusing a looming crisis, convincing teams to agree on tradeoffs, or just being a good influence.”
― Will Larson, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

“The four common archetypes of Staff-plus roles I encountered are: The Tech Lead guides the approach and execution of a particular team. They partner closely with a single manager, but sometimes they partner with two or three managers within a focused area. Some companies also have a Tech Lead Manager role, which is similar to the Tech Lead archetype but exists on the engineering manager ladder and includes people management responsibilities. The Architect is responsible for the direction, quality, and approach within a critical area. They combine in-depth knowledge of technical constraints, user needs, and organization level leadership. The Solver digs deep into arbitrarily complex problems and finds an appropriate path forward. Some focus on a given area for long periods. Others bounce from hotspot to hotspot as guided by organizational leadership. The Right Hand extends an executive’s attention, borrowing their scope and authority to operate particularly complex organizations. They provide additional leadership bandwidth to leaders of large-scale organizations. This taxonomy is more focused on being useful than complete, but so far, I’ve been able to fit every Staff-plus engineer I’ve spoken to into one of these categories. Admittedly, some folks are easier to classify than others.”
― Will Larson, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track