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Comment by staff357 | Hacker News Reader

As a "staff-plus" engineer at one of the big tech companies, I find that much of this material is simply not true in practice.

Staff promotions are of course given to some people with a good mastery of soft leadership skills, technical thought leadership and related qualities.

They are also given out for a number of other reasons. For example, when someone is perceived as a flight risk, because it makes their manager look good to promote their team, because someone has been given a lot of responsibility, whether or not they're good at handling it, because it's good for team morale to show that promotion is achievable, or because it can make a headache go away for the manager.

These reasons are all perfectly valid. But let's not overdo the Jedi-like "staff-plus" engineer trope.

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Yeah I don’t really get why some people in the community have decided that their staff titles mean they’re some kind of warrior monk caste, with these new conferences, books, websites, threads. It’s just another regular step on the ladder you make by doing a reasonably good job and growing regular skills as normal. I don’t think it requires this level of mythology or introspection.

Absolutely — the sudden lionization of the term "staff" seems to be a combination of a personal marketing push (from those selling the shovels) combined with being a useful recruiting strategy.

At one big tech company I worked at, it was never mentioned even once for years and years, and then introduced very suddenly. All existing engineers were grouped into staff versus non-staff based on their existing level, and from then on it was used for recruiting purposes — a superior title to sweeten the offer pot for experienced engineers in a competitive talent market.

I'm personally familiar with some of the people being interviewed on this list and they're fine engineers, but certainly no better than many non-staff engineers at their same companies. And to imply that they're some kind of rare, exotic special species that's totally apart from their non-staff counterparts is in total honesty, just weird.

Nearest I can tell, the term "staff engineer" was an unusual one in use at certain shops, and was popularized big time around 2020. I've kept every recruiter email I've ever gotten since 2018. Prior to 2020, the term "staff" was mentioned in exactly two of them. Starting around Feb 2020, it's now mentioned in 20+ emails a year. Before it, we just used other terms like "principal" instead.

I appreciate the viewpoint. One thing to consider is that I think many people in the industry still don’t fully grok the “IC track”, and there is a perception that you need to transition to management to really progress past senior. At FAANG this is obviously ridiculous, the staff/principal levels are visible and progression is clear.

Another related concept is that there really isn’t much written on the subject of “what should I focus on improving” for senior engineers. In a big org you can look to the engineers at the next rung for role models, but at smaller companies there might not be many staff plus, and so the diversity of types of roles may not be clear.

All this is to say that I think this advice is more useful to senior engineers at smaller companies, than it is for those at a similar stage in their career at extremely large companies.

The place I work at (size: couple of thousand employees) has had a 'staff' title for at least a decade, but my impression has always been that it was mostly just the result of "we have enough levels that we want a title above 'senior' and below 'principal'". There's no strong boundary at the 'staff' level -- if you look at the grade criteria there's a fairly clear through line all the way up, with higher grades having more responsibility, wider view of the business, etc, and of course it gets steadily harder to get the promotion.

Nearest I can tell, the term "staff engineer" was an unusual one in use at certain shops, and was popularized big time around 2020.

That looks about right. It came along with the increases in hiring and compensation in parts of the industry, the resulting employee's market, the resulting desire to show a long technical career ladder with many more steps than we used to have, and the resulting devaluation of the "senior" title that was once a big deal. For employers to show how much they value the more capable people who used to be "senior" and can take on roles like technical leadership or cross-team architecture, the employers have now adopted titles like staff, senior staff, principal, fellow, etc.

Naturally those positions attract interest for the same reason that "senior" used to. It's the level where a person typically becomes self-sufficient and able to work on more demanding initiatives under only broad direction. It's also the level where those with an interest in technical leadership become capable enough to run larger teams or groups effectively and probably limit their personal technical contributions to more strategic activities or surgical interventions.

I'm not sure how much has really changed apart from the titles, though. There has always been a qualitative shift in emphasis around that level of experience and ability for developers, whatever we choose to call it. And the responsibility and authority you have in your role, often reflected in compensation and how colleagues relate to you, has always said more about your real seniority than any formal job title.

Depends on the company, at some, including the one I'm at, most Senior Engineers will not become Staff Engineers. And from what I hear, this is a growing approach throughout the tech industry, although I think the majority of companies will still continue to treat Staff as "Senior with a few more years experience". It'll be interesting to see how the industry grows. I think we'll see more levels added above Senior beyond the two or three "Staff" type roles.

There is this whole subculture of fetishization of titles and honorifics in general that some people feel very strongly about. But there are a ton of other places where basically no one cares and they'll look at you sideways if you insist on them caring.

I used to be in group A but now I'm probably in group B. If I compare title/rank between engineering and managerial tracks where I work, there are many, many more people sitting at that rank in management than there are in engineering. The rank confers all sorts of things in terms of pay, chiefly it's used for determining our performance bonuses. I suspect that engineers are just being played by our corporate overlords but I'm not inside of the management beast to know for sure.

Having a good IC advancement track is somewhat orthogonal to a focus on specific titles across companies though. I've always been an IC and I mostly haven't even used whatever my official title was--and might even have had to look it up.

If there is an IC advancement track then the titles don't matter. All the discussion around titles is specifically to have an IC advancement track, which very few companies have.

>Yeah I don’t really get why some people in the community have decided that their staff titles mean they’re some kind of warrior monk caste,

I've never been promoted, nor have I ever promoted anyone to "staff plus" because of warrior-monk like engineering skills. Most often it is a combination of good soft skills and proven decision making around people and organization objectives. Usually it is because the person being promoted had the ability to make the business unit better in some way that is needed. And yes, that does mean that every promotion is really done to make the person a step above the newly promoted person even more effective.

> It’s just another regular step on the ladder you make by doing a reasonably good job

This is the secret. A reasonably good job means you are learning not just how to make software, but also how to lead others that are making software. There's nothing mythic about it. But for many it requires going outside of the comfort of the purely technical.

One of the reasons may that beyond big tech, the role is largely unknown, leading to huge differences how the staff role is defined. There are companies where staff means a senior+ role with equal scope and staying on the same team. In others, staff carries a significant scope change, meaning that the bar to reach staff is higher.

> They are also given out for a number of other reasons. For example, when someone is perceived as a flight risk, because it makes their manager look good to promote their team, because someone has been given a lot of responsibility, whether or not they're good at handling it, because it's good for team morale to show that promotion is achievable, or because it can make a headache go away for the manager.

Big tech company is a huge group that has widely different cultures. Based on these reasons you listed, you likely didn't work at a FAANG or similar company (Uber, Doordash, Lyft, Airbnb...etc). The reasons you listed are responsible for 0% of Staff promotions at these companies (except the "given a lot of responsibility they're not good at handing" reason you gave, assuming the person is taking credit for other people).

I agree that all of your reasons are valid for Senior and lower promotions, but these companies take Staff+ to another level by using a completely different promotion process beyond Senior level (even L5B or Senior II at Uber uses the more strict process).

The reason you see the "Jedi-like" trope is because the strict bar set for Staff plus promotions at these companies. To be fair this Jedi trope is created by the perception of other engineers because of the difficulty of achieving these levels and not knowing what it takes to do it. Career advice including this StaffEng book actually lessen the trope because it makes it clear how you can get these roles and removes all the mystique around the unknown.

The root cause for promotions occurring for the reasons you listed are due to promotion decisions being owned by just the manager or only a single chain of command (manger's manager, director..etc). This is how Senior and lower promotions also work at these FAANG+ companies. To get rid of that bias and gaming, all Staff plus promotions go through a promotion committee, and your manager has no power aside from submitting your promo packet to the committee.

No matter how bad the manager or his director of even Senior director wants to keep the employee or look good, they have no say in the promotion decision. There is a calibration process that ranks all engineers submitted to the committee against each other and only approves a small % at the top rank. Someone who got Staff promo this year might not have next year depending on the competition.

None of this is to say that the process is perfect or removes all bias. But the process is very strict and the promo comitte vigorously applies the rubric which is why you see all of this advice to exhibit skills typical on these rubrics.

> you likely didn't work at a FAANG or similar company

I do work at a FAANG company. I'm very much familiar with the promo process, as an individual, as a manager and as a peer reviewer.

Managers cannot unilaterally promote a report, but they have an influential role in helping shape the packet, in getting the right reviews from sufficiently senior employees and in trailing performance reviews. The managers also read the ladder description, not just the committees, and make sure the packets contain "evidence" of all the key points. Nothing broken here, just rigmarole that people on all sides need to follow.

You can choose to believe that the committees can do a good job of ranking applicants, but a large part of this is down to how good the packet itself is.

I should state that nothing is wrong here in my opinion. There's no managerial conspiracy or role inflation. My point is that being a Jedi-like "Staff-plus" engineer is not at all necessary to reach the level.

True the manager does have influence in that way. They can definitely increase the chances. I read the parent comment as saying it was as flexible as Senior and below promos which is why I incorrectly assumed you hadn't worked in FAANG culture.

I think the promo comittees do a significantly better job than relying on managers alone, but they definitely have bias. Not perfect, or even good but still way better because there's less incentive to game the system.

I agree that Staff-plus isn't Jedi-like and there is a trope about that. I assumed your criticism there was about the StaffEng book which doesn't promote that trope, instead it gives a practical guide on what it usually takes to get that promo.

I recently interviewed at a startup and they offered me the hilariously inflated title "Senior Member of Technical Staff". Couldn't get them to meet my comp expectations though, so I didn't take the job.

No such thing as “staff” when the headcount is 2.

Isn't that just Senior? At least that's what Salesforce calls their Senior eng.

No, in some companies SMTS is a specific title a few ranks above “Senior Engineer” and a couple ranks below “Fellow” or “Partner” or whatever the company calls the ultimate rank.

Other companies use “Member of Technical Staff” as a generic job description in place of “Software Engineer”, “IT Analyst”, etc. Then the promotion ranks are called “MTS 1”, “MTS 2”, etc.

Some times it even more unrelated to skill. Uber recently changed senior title to staff for everyone

It's ego and job security. Rather than teach all engineers their Jedi mind-tricks, they keep it in their own special group. Now only they can be hired to do the super secret fancy stuff, and they get paid more.

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