The definition I have generally seen for "staff engineer" is an engineering leadership position without direct reports - I see "manager" as generally meaning "has direct reports".
I think this is important: leadership and management are not the same things!
Engineering management is more on the management of people and engineer leadership is more on the management of products/projects/systems.
My manager, skip, and director have all been extremely supportive of this throughout the process, despite it taking a somewhat lengthy period of time and putting me (a senior-almost staff eng on the team) in a position where it's very difficult for me to commit to a significant ownership of big strategic things (which is my job) since I might transfer out at any moment.
Similarly, a few years back, I expressed intent to transfer away from my team to my manager. He basically said "stick around an extra quarter since you're on the cusp of promotion and it'll be easier this way" (and he was correct, my promotion would have been delayed if I transferred first), and I did and got promoted, and ended up staying longer, for various reasons.
Additionally, my managers have all been receptive to my goals in terms of career growth: do I want to lean into management (no!) or into deep technical expertise? Do I want to go for additional promotions, or am I happy to stay in the role I'm in and continue doing the same kind of work?
All of this, to me, reads more like career management than job management.
This is an incredibly common part of the role(s), so my guess is that you have been unlucky in this.
For what it's worth, all the strong managers I've ever know or worked with pay attention this this, and vast majority of companies (again in my experience) made it an explicit part of their role.
I'd go so far as to say as a people manager (as opposed to a project manager, say) you cannot do a great job without considering things like career progression, because if you don't, you don't understand your team well enough to be really effective.
I could be very unlucky, sure, but I've worked at my fair share of places and it's always been the same. Management is there to keep the cats herded and HR is there to make sure nobody fucks with the money. All that matters is that I do my job and that the employer can use the manager to push more work on me under the guise of setting myself up for a promotion or raise that will never, ever come - it never has.
> all the strong managers I've ever know or worked with pay attention this this, and vast majority of companies (again in my experience) made it an explicit part of their role.
All enhancing an employee's career does is ensure that they have leverage to negotiate higher salaries or leaving the company. No company wants this.
> I'd go so far as to say as a people manager (as opposed to a project manager, say) you cannot do a great job without considering things like career progression, because if you don't, you don't understand your team well enough to be really effective.
Sure, you know where strengths and weaknesses are but that doesn't mean you devote company resources to making the employee better suited for leaving the company. You can do things like growth but you're going to come around and put penalties and fees to prevent the employee from leaving voluntarily.
I have never seen any manager or business treat an employee's career as anything but an inconvenience at best nor have I heard of any of my coworkers or friends or family having experienced anything like this. I can only assume that it doesn't exist or that it is so rare that it may as well not exist.
Explicitly, no. Growing talent inside is far less risky than hiring from the outside. Sometimes that means someone will leave, yes - but if the relationship is good they will do it at the right time when they are ready, not when they are miserable. This is win win. Long term net positives here are hard to understate.
> I can only assume that it doesn't exist or that it is so rare that it may as well not exist.
Well I can equally attest your assumption is false. But this is probably just a demonstration that path dependence is a real thing.
All I can say is you have a very negative view of the whole situation, which doesn't match my experience at all, or that of many people I know.
A power culture has zero trust and is high blame. Bureaucratic is process oriented. Generative experiments, tests, learns from failure.
The organization you have never experienced is generative. And coupled with transformational leadership it’s a pleasant environment to work in as either a manager or IC. These orgs do exist and are not rare either.
On the other hand people's sense of who they should really listen to always skews to their manager (the person that can fire and/or promote them, or at least has the most say in the process).
(I originally wrote this with "responsible" in place of "accountable" but that was fuzzier; surely as a staff engineer I'm responsible for more than my direct contributions even if I'm not directly accountable for them.)
Leadership is about leading: helping the company make strategic decisions about what problems to solve and how to solve them, mentoring and inspiring and educating others, generally up-leveling the wider organization but without the direct responsibility of managing individuals.
I'm responsible for the wellbeing of my direct reports. I need to ensure they can grow their careers. I need to know when they're stressed or burnt out or bored. I need to manage projects and be a shit umbrella.
While I am technically strong, I have architects and technical fellows who are WAY stronger than me. I work closely with them to ensure we're adopting the latest best practices and tools. They do much of the system design. They also mentor newer employees, but they don't have direct responsibility for those employee's careers. And they don't have direct responsibility for the success or failure of any given project.
Management: you can change their pay grade.
Engineer gets evaluated by the products they contribute to that launch.
People whose job title is manager might have to lead people too, but they're being held accountable for managing a thing. A project, a product, a budget, a release, a software system. Managing means 'making sure the thing happens'.
What a staff+ engineer is held accountable for is engineering. What gets built and how. That a technical solution meets its requirements and constraints.
In order to do that they might also need to lead people. But they don't have to manage anything.