The Staff Engineer's Path Quotes

“I've often heard people say that you should focus on what you're good at. I don't entirely agree: you should put points into what you want to be good at so you can build up those skills.”
― Tanya Reilly, The Staff Engineer's Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change

“Yes, you can be an introvert. No, you can't be a jerk.”
― Tanya Reilly, The Staff Engineer's Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change

“As you grow in influence, you’ll find that more and more people want you to care about things. Someone’s putting together a best practices document for how your organization does code review, and they want your opinion. Your group is doing a hiring push and needs help deciding what to interview for. There’s a deprecation that would be making more progress if it had a staff engineer drumming up senior sponsorship. And that’s just Monday morning. What do you do?”
― Tanya Reilly, The Staff Engineer's Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change

“I’ll unpack the staff engineer role by looking at what I think of as its three pillars: big-picture thinking”
― Tanya Reilly, The Staff Engineer's Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change

“Optimize for maintenance, not creation.”
― Tanya Reilly, The Staff Engineer's Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change

“Wrong is better than vague.”
― Tanya Reilly, The Staff Engineer's Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change

“What will Future You wish that Present You had done?”
― Tanya Reilly, The Staff Engineer's Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change

“progression.fyi”
― Tanya Reilly, The Staff Engineer's Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change

“If you can train your brain to say “That’s interesting!” and remember facts that you might need later on, you’ll start to add detail to your maps and build skills in synthesizing new information.”
― Tanya Reilly, The Staff Engineer's Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change