What Is a Staff Engineer?
nishtahir.com
nishtahir.com
From my observation, there is a certain inflection point in a senior level engineer's career where their expectation rapidly grows in that no one can realistically match it alone. The quality of your work will saturate and it's physically impossible to "work harder". Some extraordinary engineers could delay that point a bit but they will be eventually there.
At the moment, they will need to figure out a consistent, reproducible way to scale their contribution. If they want further career progression. The most direct way is becoming an engineering manager. Someone may develop a technical and organizational skill to influence high level decisions and prioritization. Or just become an engineering genius...
There are many other possible ways to achieve this, but the point is that further contribution at this point usually needs a radically different way. I do see that many companies tend to grant a title of "Staff Engineer" to those folks able to figure out how to handle this situation.
In my own experience it's also entirely common for your comp and responsibilities to grow and grow until your working peers are all directors, VPs, and heads of this or that and you're meant to act as their API layer to an entire team of humans executing on your technical direction, but your title is just Senior Engineer.
Internally everyone understands this and treats you accordingly, but it sure looks bad on linkedin.
e.g. The most important senior engineer, with an equivalent rank just one level below the CTO, would be the ‘First rank X Engineer’, then the next level below would be the ‘Second rank X Engineer’, and so on…
I think that what you said is only true in the same way "there's no single definition of a manager" is true.
Staff Engineers live on the critical path of implementation and directly contribute to their execution.
What does this mean?
Managers need a lot of information to create this alignment, to set correct goals, and to allocate resources effectively.
The first part of a Staff Engineers job is to help provide that information. That might be through prototyping software to inform what is possible or the tradeoffs of taking different approaches. That might be through having an in depth knowledge of technical constraints, historical decision making, and business domain that the manager can query. That might be through seeing patterns with bugs or inefficiencies on the team and surfacing them. That might be through staying abreast of larger industry trends and thinking about how they apply to your team's software.
It's ultimately about removing unknowns so the manager can negotiate effectively on the teams behalf when setting goals and create a plan that will be successful to achieve those goals.
The second part of a Staff Engineers job is to help make sure those goals are met. That might be through solving complex issues when they arise in development. That might be through directly contributing code to projects that are behind because effort was underestimated. That might be through building frameworks to make the whole team more productive. That might be indirectly through setting an example for other team members to follow or consciously influencing team culture. That might be through picking up responsibilities for an overworked manager like coordinating between different teams or helping the team organize tasks. That might be teaching and up-leveling team members. That might be through providing a second set of eyes from a different perspective to the manager about how the work is going.
Unlike line engineers who are evaluated on if they completed the work assigned to them at a satisfactory level, Staff Engineers like managers are evaluated on if the team shipped the agreed upon software on time or not. But the levers they have to pull to achieve those results are different.
At least that's my take on the role and why I think it's not the path everyone should pursue.
I feel like the job and the skillset required to do it well are sufficiently different for it to be a different path that you need to consciously decide you want to go down.
I feel like once you reach Senior Software Engineer, you can stay there forever. There is no longer an automatic 'next' level you're trying to get prompted to.
Does this imply that becoming a manager is also "not a promotion" in your organization?
I’d classify the dimensions as:
- Compensation - obvious one. May vary by org
- Authority - are you officially allowed to give orders? Hire and fire?
- Respect and influence- in your org, do people specifically want EMs to be active in areas ICs are not, like strategy, etc. varies widely.
- Alignment with personal Career goals - some people hate management-type duties - so for them, this EM title change would be “not a promotion” to them
I’d say EM is a promotion in some of those ways and it varies a lot by org for sure.
Personally, I am happy to die as IC, having tasted management related roles.
After 30 years of engineering experience, I tried to transition from engineer to engineering manager, and I hated every minute of it.
To me, a staff engineer can deliver that application at that level, and can lead senior engineers in maintaining and enhancing it.
We also consider a level above that, the principal engineer, who is primarily focused on higher level and longer term thinking and less about individually jumping into tickets and features. They re-envision the entire approach to implementing the business logic and scale the business in ways that seniors are mostly helpless at. They do work through others much more, and I do personally see Staff Engineer as the highest level where you primarily are still coding day to day.
The way I look at it is that levels only make sense within an organization that is big enough that a hierarchy is needed to scale. At that point staff+ IC levels are needed because you want purely technical people on the same pay scale and influence level as managers to counteract the incentives of empire building that can corrupt the entire architecture and lead to a Dead Sea effect of engineering talent if left unchecked.
From this perspective most staff+ work is in some way generating influence and impact across multiple teams and individuals. Outside of certain specialties and specific R&D roles I think it’s pretty hard to justify staff leveling on purely technical work.
Of course different companies calibrate levels differently, and they’re all subject to level inflation, but that’s my feeling for a traditional Google L6.
If you have a SWE1 that can literally just greenfield an entire application and do it at a very high level, then they are a unicorn / 10X developer operating at a ~SDE4 level already.
I personally do not think the average SDE1 can meaningfully contribute to a quickly moving and efficient team. By the time they are even able to contribute regularly, they are SWE2/mid in my book.
I do have much less experience in giant beaurocratic slow moving organizations so I don't have an opinion on how all of that rigmarole works, I'm speaking more to highly focused small teams delivering at a high level quickly.
To say it a different way: consider hobbyist developers who have spent a lot of time developing technical skills. These folks will tend to be very good at creating greenfield apps, and depending what they do, they may also have technical chops that are applicable to large companies as well. So they may be able to be hired as L4 or L5 (Google leveling) just based on technical chops. L6+ will be tough though, unless they have very deep specialist knowledge, because the most common L6+ work is about using technical knowledge to achieve outcomes that depend on navigating multiple teams and stakeholders in a way that the solo dev never has to deal with.
What I say to a ton of mentees as they mature into staff/pe, is the important thing is to always figure out what is the highest leverage thing you could be doing. if it's coding, code. if it's writing a doc to explain to other people why other people should be coding, write a doc. if it is slowly nursing junior engineers through a multi-year arc that you could do in a week, maybe that's what you need to do tho I'm seconding guessing that one. But you definitely shouldn't be hanging up the keyboard as a tech ic.
Also as of this week at 9 years at a company, I have now shipped code in almost every language the company uses, and on all but: salesforce, an actual prod sagemaker model (all local prototypes), jira workflows, and SAP.
Then everybody who didn't work at those places wanted that title too.
In banking, the title is "Vice President". It means virtually nothing, there are hundreds of them in every bank, a reason I heard was "otherwise nobody will take your calls." Many people in their 20s who go to business school to get their MBA have already been VPs at banks.
This is why I always laugh when people point out title inflation in tech like it’s unique or egregious. Finance has been like this for much longer.
https://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.com/2013/03/curriculum-v...
Analyst -> Associate -> Assistant VP -> VP -> Director -> Managing Director
There’s a whole hierarchy of Assistant, Associate, Deputy Commissioners. Is it better to be a Special Assistant to the Associate Commissioner, or the Assistant Deputy Commissioner?
Ha! I learned that when I was quitting a senior engineer job (around 2000) and my manager said if I they'd make me a "member of (the) technical staff".
Since I had never heard of such a title before (I would have been the first MTS at that company) my response was roughly "(a) aren't I part of the technical staff already? And (b) you're "offering" to strip my "senior" title? And my "engineer" title? WTF? I'm quitting already, you didn't have to be insulting about it"
The confusion was cleared up, eventually, but that conversation definitely didn't go the way my manager expected it to (and I still quit - no regrets).
Honestly, I still don't think the MTS/Staff Eng. labels make any sense. My last few & current employers use "principal eng." for the same job function, which just seems so much clearer.
"I still want to code, and less Microsoft Teams"
Typically it means having a broad experience across product lines and being able to give pointers to the confused.
My interpretation of it was to pursue the type of work and things you focus on as an Engineering Manager in terms of getting the most of out teams for the goals of the organization but doing so without the need to manage people directly. Which I would agree is nice since it’s really hard to wear the technical hat and also directly manage people, so separation of concerns makes for far less context switching and folks to naturally align doing the part of the job that they do best. I also agree with this definition since it’s how I think of it too.
I'd also add "team lead" to the list of possible titles that indicate a primary focus on people management vs. individual contribution.
Yes, this. There may come a point in your career where your old manager is advancing and they need a new manager for your team. The position is offered to you, maybe repeatedly. It's clear that either you take it or you and your teammates will soon have a new manager who is fresh to the team or company. Maybe you've seen the latter go badly before. Maybe your outgoing manager expresses their own anxiety about that possibility. You finally get the hint and become a manager.
Now you can change from the engineering ladder to the management ladder, but you don't have to. You can be an Engineering Manager, commit all your time to this, and hope to advance to Engineering Director. Or you can stay a Staff (Software) Engineer and also manage a few people. With some help from say a good PM, you can be a good manager to a small team without giving up the technical aspects. (I assert part-time managers are actually better for small, high-performing teams; no idle time for micro management.)
> I'd also add "team lead" to the list of possible titles that indicate a primary focus on people management vs. individual contribution.
Maybe. At some companies (e.g. Google), a team's tech lead and manager can be two different people. If so, the tech lead doesn't have reports according to HR. At promo time, they don't do the manager reviews, although they likely put a fair bit of time into writing peer reviews and participate in the promo and calibration committees, so they're not entirely without what many smaller and/or more traditional companies would consider manager responsibilities.
Yes, I've worked in an environment like that. I had a "functional manager" that took care of the HR side of things and a "team lead" that kind of led an effort for a specific project. They also interacted with each other about how things were going. I also agree that for small, high-performing teams it can be a very nice arrangement for everyone.
But my point was that the "team lead" role ends up requiring some amount of people management while not taking over as the primary focus for the person with that role, "no idle time for micro management" as you said. I may have been lazy with "a primary focus" as a construction because while I don't think it's >50% of time for a team lead in the structure I worked in or imagined in this discussion, I do think it can be around 20% for that person, depending on how they feel about people management, and the dynamics that exist between those involved, and the size of the team being led.
I need to ask for a raise, because I've probably been doing both of those jobs.
senior engineer ≈ engineering team lead
staff engineer/tech lead ≈ engineering manager
principal engineer ≈ senior engineering manager
Reiterating that management is not a "promotion" from senior engineer, but a track switch.
That said, the maximum compensation ceiling is ultimately higher on the management track at director/vp level. Personally, no thanks, don't want that job. Staff+ IC is where it's at for me.
I think engineering manager is the easier path to advancement. Compare for example Google Staff Software Engineer (L6) vs Engineering Manager (L6). [1, 2] The latter gets paid more but IMHO the ladder expectations are easier to meet, and even more so when advancing to L7.
This is admittedly cynical, but to some extent I think managers are often judged by the size of their empire, while engineers are judged by their (individual or team) accomplishments, which includes setting the overall project design and filling in gaps between the smaller pieces delegated to other engineers. Building a large empire is easier but can be counterproductive. To accomplish things you also need good design oversight, technical mentorship, etc. that managers aren't expected to deliver.
A lot of people who are passionate enough about software stay on the SWE ladder in spite of the relative difficulty. I know someone who switched to the management ladder then eventually (at great trouble) switched back; he nearly got down-leveled in the process.
There are great engineering managers out there of course, but I think in general the difference in expectations is real and unfortunate.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer?countryId=254&mod...
[2] https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,LinkedIn,Facebook&tra...
1. HC doesn't accrue like that anymore. 2. Many organizations are looking to delayer; harder to promote up to director when your org went from 9 runs to 5.
I hear a lot of the focus going to Tech Lead Manager roles--fewer reports but more hand-on keyboard than EM roles of the past.
It’s just a title, if your work wants to call you a staff engineer, cool. But you should probably care more about pay and less about titles.
I believe I understand where you are coming from. However, that's not entirely fair. Most jobs have "no legal certification process", but that doesn't make their job title meaningless. Not everyone who wants to define what a title means is doing so to gain or assign clout, many just want to understand what a person with that title typically does.
Granted, there are some titles (especially in technical roles, in some companies), that tell nothing more than "that person works in I. T." (or whatever your company calls it). For example, I've seen roles called "Systems Analyst", that varied greatly in responsibility -- some where all the person did was code all day, some where the person almost never wrote any code. Sometimes that was two people in the same group at the same company.
So yes, titles can hold only a very small amount of meaning, at times, but that doesn't make them entirely meaningless.
Also, watching Practical Engineering has had a huge impact on both my perception of "real engineering" and on my own work. He goes over a whole bunch of civil engineering topics and it's obvious that they're doing the same kind of work, just in a different domain, and with in most cases about as much due diligence as I have in my job. It's not a different universe, just a different neighborhood.
So in theory a staff engineer has directly delegated authority/trust under the VP or whatever of a large engineering area.
And that reminds me of a quote from Rommel:
Men are basically smart or dumb and lazy or ambitious. The dumb and ambitious ones are dangerous and I get rid of them. The dumb and lazy ones I give mundane duties. The smart and ambitious ones I put on my staff. The smart and lazy ones I make my commanders.
One of the responsibilities of a staff+ engineer is to be a high-judgement technical advisor to the leaders of large teams comprised of smaller teams. This role calls for high-level strategic thinking, talent development, as well as working with counterparts on peer teams to align the technical capabilities and strategies with the larger organization's objectives.
Impact
The engineer who wrote the MVP of the product and grew it's customer base to hundreds of MM ARR -> staff.
The engineer who steers the ship for a 50 person org -> staff
The engineer working in a corner on a novel solution to the companies perf/accuracy/security challenges -> staff.
Everything that you do is in service of creating impact, but having a bunch of useless meetings or providing useless mentorship is exactly that - useless.
It's the minimum level of industry credibility.
It's impossible to define in any generalized measurable way, because it's whatever the organization wants it to mean at that moment.
Usually, a staff engineer is hyper in-sync with the business needs and able to spot where the deficiencies are. They are also very diplomatic, great communicators, and people enjoy working with them. "Lifting you up, lifts me up."
I feel like this article wants to talk about the performance matrix through the lens of four pillars, and just arbitrarily chose "staff" as the role to talk about since it's a very senior engineer.
A staff engineer is the one who tells the manager what the targets should be.
In all tech environments I've worked at the "status" of a staff engineer is higher than that of a bottom-level manager.
Same as every other title.
Is this really true? There's usually quite the big difference for line manager vs director, Head of XXX where you operate on much bigger scope, plan budgets, etc.
For ICs it is true that many times "Staff Engineer" is basically the higher pay band for Senior Engineers. But many times from Staff+ you expect them to be able to lead projects or programs, act as an architect and advisor to management. In general bigger scope stuff than just being a specialist in a given technology.
And, indeed, I believe that applies to every promotion up to something like the C-suite, where I have zero experience and can't comment.
Now onto my opinion. The Staff that I've met in my life are more of the solitary type, the Individual Contributor class of person who have decades of experience in their expertise and supporting skills. Yes they may have the responsibility defining the work for others, but that mostly happens as an architect. They herd seniors not mentor juniors.
The article itself doesn't work hard enough to set the bar and explain to me why I should give the title to someone when in some companies these are just the responsibilities of a senior or at a stretch Principal. With extremely rare exceptions, this has become position inflation for the sake of looking good when going to VCs.
How large a team? It varies but I'd say at least 25 and often much larger. How long a horizon? As far as the organization can plan. They generally report to someone with a title like Director or VP and advise that person and their staff (typically managers and other staff engineers) or do high-level technical work needed, like evaluating a new technology or system that the team wants to invest in or depend on.
The consequence of this is that the "day to day" of the role is highly variable based on what the org needs at the time. Sometimes it's hands-on development for tricky technical tasks, sometimes it's talent development, sometimes it's dealing with escalations or emergent issues.
I think this high degree of variability plus the fact that a lot of the "staff meeting" work is not visible to line engineers contributes to the confusion about the role.
I'd consider everything on here an important for senior engineers as well. (Just putting this in numbers, if a company engineering is ~40% senior engineers and ~10% staff or above, if all the things listed have to go through that 10%, that's a big bottleneck.)
I liked the OP’s description of glue work because it matched my understanding of fixing problems. And I liked their discussion that glue work can’t be the only thing you do (I would argue that if it is, you haven’t actually fixed whatever problem created the glue work)
> ... you schedule meetings with...
I get what the author is saying, but I think they chose a way that's likely to be misunderstood.
A good >senior engineer:
- Understands the problem space
- Understands what the team has done
- Understands the value goal
- Has researched alternate approaches
- Finds and introduces the right people
- Guides the conversation productively
- Ensures everyone understands post-meeting
tl;dr - Don't just schedule meetings: engineer productive exchanges.
These kinds of discussions bother me because it always implies some kind of worthiness of the title. Maybe it’s just my work experience but I’ve found very little correlation with e.g. the success of an engineer’s career trajectory and the success of the projects they’re responsible for.
Going a little more off topic now but these discussions always leave me feeling a bit like how Richard Feynman describes his instinct to be repulsed by “honors” and everything like them:
They must already have everything else it takes to succeed, since it's a requirement for the job. But the vision and drive to go in for themselves is not a requirement and if they don't have it, they will become a valued staff engineer.
I'm not sure I buy it, but that's how it comes across, since a staff engineer is supposed to be blessed with all these wonderful talents.
https://phaven-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/files/image_part/asset/...
feels like every area that I've obtained deep technical knowledge has gone obsolete
It's also kinda self feeding - why would you take on the extra hassle and responsibility of management without getting a payrise for it.
Engineer
Engineer 2
Senior Engineer
Staff Engineer (You would not part an old man from his walking stick, would you?)
Senior staff (now it's getting bad)
...
ninkendo's comment is spot on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42091132