I can't recall "staff engineer" being something people even talked about before ~2 years ago. It's strange to see this idea come up and become taken seriously, seemingly out of nowhere.
Nonsense it's as old as the tech industry, and the defence industry it grew out of.
The name comes from the military, where it's even older.
I was curious about this, because I also think of the staff engineer as a newish thing, and I don't believe I've ever actually met one.
I searched my old email for the term and found that the first reference I have was in January 1996, in a HotWired HotFlash newsletter:
"Java - so-named because it evokes liveliness and speed - is the brainchild of Arthur van Hoff, a senior staff engineer at Sun Microsystems. He's the HotJava engineering lead, has designed most of the Java applet API, is the implementor of the current Java compiler, and is the author of the book "Hooked on Java." Get the scoop behind the hype, when Arthur van Hoff joins us in Club Wired on Friday, 12 January, at 12 p.m. PST (20:00 GMT)."
After that there's really nothing until the term starts appearing in LinkedIn notifications around 2010. I guess that just means it wasn't used in the circles I moved in, so only became visible to me when I joined LinkedIn.
I don't think of the tech industry I have been working in as being related to defense much at all - I trace my computing roots back to the home computer era of the '80s. Perhaps there have been parallel streams which are now mixing.
On the other hand I have never cared about titles, so perhaps it's been there all along and I just didn't notice.
Maybe you’re now reaching that level yourself so now interacting with those people?
Like saying ‘how come nobody’s ever discussed prostrate exams until I got to my 40s’.
> I don't think of the tech industry I have been working in as being related to defense much at all
Microprocessors come from defence, as does Silicon Valley.
We should rename all the accountants "staff" though.
As the GP said these titles have existed for a long time. But for whatever reason there's also been a progression in terms of them being super common in social media discussions.
The cynic in me says that it is driven by a certain subset of Internet Famous Devs progressing through their career.
From my experience job descriptions/title that lean into "architect" tend to attract people that can theorize about how software ought to be built all day, but haven't written a single line of code in ages.