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Comment by badgersnake | Hacker News Reader

As a staff engineer with team lead responsibilities I would love to be able to attain that kind of flow. Unfortunately, a lot of my job is liaising with product managers and making sure the team is focused on the right things or writing and reviewing documents.

This work needs to be done but it doesn’t leave me much time to get into coding things and thus I would score very low on that productivity measure because I’m hardly ever in the inner loop.

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> staff engineer with team lead responsibilities

Bit of a tangent, but I'm just curious if that's that some staffs (but not all) and above are leads, or if it's that engineering & management tracks are orthogonal but not mutually exclusive?

I was attempted to idly discuss/suggest the latter was a possibility recently (not in a position to effect it), and I'm not sure I made my point very effectively or coherently. If that is the case where you work, are you aware of any sort of name for that or keyword? Hard sort of thing to search for otherwise.

From my limited experience, Staff+ seems to have a lot of the same responsibilities as a manager, but without the direct reports—they're both “leadership” positions and focus on long(er)-term planning, business needs, cross-team communication, and enabling others rather than doing the work themselves. Though in lieu of people management, Staff+ engineers do get to spend some time coding, but it's pretty rarely the majority of their job.

So to that extent, I think there's quite a lot in common between engineering and management tracks after a certain point, both because there's a genuine need for that, and because direct code contributions just don't scale in the same way that helping others does.

It depends on the team, the projects, the phase of the projects and the weather forecast. To me this "staff" stuff just means doing more of whatever it takes while making sure the other engineers learn and grow, not doing everything yourself just because you're able to.

Sometimes it means plowing into code and implementing stuff, because that's the main thrust at the time and where the most effort needs to be focused. Sometimes it means backing away and researching problems at a high level to save others from having to get out of focus.

Whether that's team leading or engineering or managering is a moot point to me.

I would read these two pieces as they lay things out pretty well:

https://staffeng.com/guides/what-do-staff-engineers-actually...

https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-archetypes/

I think it all depends on who you are and what your team needs.

I think this from your second link is closest to what I'm getting at:

> Somewhat confusingly, some companies use Tech Lead as a title, and others use it as a role. In this list of archetypes, the Tech Lead is one approach to operating as a Staff engineer, but it's quite common to perform the Tech Lead role without having the impact expected of a Staff-level engineer.

My point is a bit 'bigger' than how do you operate in your position as staff engineer and what does the org need from you, what I'm getting at is about the structure of roles themselves - like it can be that your technical track/ladder (junior/mid/senior/staff/distinguished/principal/fellow/whatever) is IC that managers are completely separate, not the same people (junior/mid/senior/whatever managers). It can also be that people managers are separate, but technical management of projects is intertwined with the more senior roles.

What I was thinking about specifically, not knowing really whether anyone does this or not, was the possibility of people being on at least one of those tracks, i.e. maybe both, but that they're distinct roles. So you might be a staff engineer but a more junior manager. (And you might manage a different team than you work in, I suppose, but that would probably be inconvenient and anyway isn't really important one way or the other here.) But I suppose it also depends how or if you divide technical and people management anyway. I just don't really have the keywords to find much discussing it; your links are good though, thanks, I'll read some more on the site.

Google has a title called TLM which is tech lead + manager which is meant to straddle the divide. In practice you have twice the expectations which are themselves conflicting with only the one salary. It is often used for ICs to try out management before making the decision which ladder to stay on. Most TLMs are at the staff level so kind of fits that staff engineer who is a junior manager that you describe.

Yeah I see that now on the site you linked, as well as in his book I think & Tanya Reilly's 'The SE Path' linked from its intro (that's all I can read before it arrives). Both seem helpful texts (I've ordered & have access to ebook resp.) so really appreciate the link, thanks.

Where I work some but not all. I chose it because I’m undecided whether my next move will be management or technical.

> As a staff engineer with team lead responsibilities

In my experience, lead ==> doing stuff to keep everyone else in "flow" or "not going off-piste".

Sounds like you're doing a decent job of it :+1:

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