They are the glue that gets buy-in and agreement between people talking past each other. They demonstrate how a healthy organization can lead a team by setting guidelines for collaboration, communicating, being constructive, and removing barriers or silos between key stakeholders. They can resolve disagreements and unblock political stalemates with their unilateral authority and uncanny conflict resolution skills.
That's a management function.
If I took a Staff Engineer role and my job was to compensate for organizational dysfunction and fill voids left by underperforming managers, I'd be leaving that role very quickly. Either that or requesting a formal title change (or promotion) into an actual management position.
Hiring a Staff Engineer when you really need better managers isn't a good solution, especially because a Staff Engineer wouldn't have the necessary org structure authority to be an effective manager-of-managers.
Eh. You might not fit it, but I really like that role. I don't want to be out of technical conversations and I don't love reports, but I do really like facilitating a path forward. At the moment I'm working outside of an engineering function, but I do it when wearing that hat, too.
> a Staff Engineer wouldn't have the necessary org structure authority to be an effective manager-of-managers
If that were the job, then yes. It is a soft-power role, though, not a hard-power structural role.
Limited authority absolutely can be a problem, but usually due to intransigence, at which point the hard-power elements of the org (who are typically limited in their available attention span) can be escalated to.
iirc this kind of role, and other glue are actually really great Scrum Master && Project Manager skills.
I'm not suggesting that the role isn't helpful or that some people wouldn't like it.
This is the problem:
> At the moment I'm working outside of an engineering function,
If the company needs a firefighting cross-team manager, get a firefighting cross-team manager and empower them accordingly.
But hiring Staff Engineers to combat management dysfunction is a misunderstanding of the Staff Engineer role.
So say, in such an organization, two teams each with a Staff Engineer are taking different and conflicting approaches, and neither Staff has been able to pursuade the other to their side? Often in this scenario it's extremely valuable to have a technically capable third-party mediator to help bring the two together.
Sounds like the bright line is the problem.
> That's a management function.
Not at a technical level it's not. If there are honest disagreements about technical direction, you need a strong technical voice and vision to break the logjam. That's not a management problem, although it certainly requires excellent soft skills (requisite for any good Staff+).
It takes both the soft skills and the technical knowledge to get consensus, or at the very least, consent.
Those people are an absolute necessity, and I think it's very tough for someone to be effective in that role if they don't have a solid technical understanding, but I also don't think that an engineer has the clout to wrangle people the way a _therapist_ needs to. In a small organization, maybe, but at a decent size, mid-sized company and larger it will need to be someone working on the business side, not development or IT operations
But I'd call this person The Wolf (named after the Harvey Keitel's character in Pulp Fiction.
Does this person get to ride off into the sunset in a fancy sports car, with the babe from the junkyard?
Years ago, one of them had a Macbook Pro while the rest of us were dealing with garbage Dell laptops that barely worked due to aggressive security scanners. He got his turned off by IT.