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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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.

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> 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.

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.

> I, on the other hand, 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.

iirc this kind of role, and other glue are actually really great Scrum Master && Project Manager skills.

You probably don't hire a project manager to also occasionally buckle down and write code, though. ;) Supersets, not subsets.

> 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.

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.

Depends on the role of management in the company. At some companies there is a bright line where managers are expected to _not_ participate directly in the technical discussion of how to solve problems.

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.

A stalemate between staff engineers isn't a technical problem.

Sounds like the bright line is the problem.

> > They are the glue that gets buy-in and agreement between people talking past each other.

> 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.

A people manager isn't the person to build consensus between teams (necessarily). With complex technical problems, designs and discussions, it's the people with deep technical expertise and good communications skills who will play this role. At my previous employer, these were called "technical architects" but whatever you call them, they are not usually in the "manage other people" role.

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