How I got promoted to staff engineer twice
seangoedecke.com
seangoedecke.com
I went from eng, to sr eng, to principal eng, back to eng, making more money each time along the way across different orgs.
Our industry has little to no real standards. Congrats on your promotion, but your title ultimately means little across companies.
For some it was effective.
This isn't reflecting the OP case though.
Instead of trying to climb those ranks, it might perhaps make more sense to look for a place where your input is valued based on its own merit and not based on what label is attached to your active directory entry.
You might be applying for a job and, since they have limited other information, your existing job title is used as signal to figure out if what you’re saying has merit. Particularly if what you’re saying doesn’t mesh with their own experience or expectations.
There isn't a single place where status (and by extension titles showing that status) wouldn't change how people communicate and how open they are to your ideas.
If you think you're in a place that doesn't do that, you're either deliberately closing your eyes to it, are the privileged high status person (and closing your eyes to it) or you don't understand how human relations work.
Even in places where "your own merit" counts, there's a big status gradient between which ideas get listened to. If you don't have titles encoding that status gradient, you just have informal authority structure which does the same.
Of course it's unrealistic to expect that the status gradient simply shouldn't matter. It's perfectly natural (and useful, healthy) to weigh what people say according to their status, to some degree. It's just human relations, as you say.
Where things become problematic is when their putative status becomes the primary or overriding factor. That is, "X is true (simply) because Y said so" environments. Or "You're just an L{N}, but I'm a L{N+k} so even though I don't actually know what I'm talking about, I don't have to listen to you" environments.
Those are the ones you want to avoid.
Is there no weight to credibility? Similarly, if Terry Tao refuses to even read your ideas unless you have the right professional look, is that cruelly dismissive and arrogant?
But in that case, the title is typically paired with authority. The authority is probably what people care about.
Staff engineers are mostly concerned with teams and projects moving forward, not writing code much.
On the other hand it's company specific. The same way armies differ in their pyramid and roles and responsibilities so do engineering teams.
As if the absence of the word “staff” in the org chart means there’s no one doing staff-level work.
Your manager also needs enough political capital to drive the promotion. This is something I have an acute awareness of, having been told for the last 3 years that I was operating at the principal level (no staff title here) but not getting promoted. Eventually my manager was forced out of the company by bullying from my skip-level, so now I'm left to look for a new role elsewhere or spend some unknown amount of time building the relationship with my new manager.
Just to be clear, I got promoted when the rules and definitions weren’t as clearly defined. That doesn’t mean I’m undeserving of the title, but it does highlight how, even within the same organization, the criteria for who can hold certain titles and receive promotions have evolved over time. Because of this, I feel the experience described here can seem somewhat arbitrary given the way most companies have no shared setup / structure for promotions and skill levels. Congratulations on the promotion non the less.
This is giving me major white savior vibes, as in management didn't want to talk to those foreginers who acted and spoke English funny, so he became the Western face of the team, and took all the credit. All of which is sadly a thing.
- That still doesn't address the core issue which isn't inherently racial. It's that if you come from a certain part of the world, there's an effective glass ceiling for you and all of your achievements and hard work has to go through a Western person, whose only attribute is being more palatable to Western tastes. Not hard work, not technical expertise, not spending sleepless nights getting the blocker bugs fixed so that the product can ship on time. What do you think that does to morale? And is it morally right to run a company this way?
- A person named Sean Goedecke probably isn't that person anyways.
It's already happening.
Heaven forbid that a good communicator get promoted to deal with people, or that people be proficient in the language of the land. The promotion couldn't have been because of seniority, clear communication, or high competence. No, there's no possible explanation besides racism and xenophobia.
>All of which is sadly a thing.
There are at least as many places that refuse to promote white people because of the possibility that it might be seen this way. There's nothing inherently wrong with having a white manager. Managers often appear to get more credit than their subordinates, for better or worse. The combination of a US native worker (who can stay here forever by the way) plus management does not add up to racism.
> Staff promotions only happen at a company that has staff roles
Does this mean that the companies who don't have staff roles are fundamentally incapable of delivering software of the same quality as the ones who do? Doesn't this actually show how arbitrary job titles are?
It’s also not true? I was the first “Staff” engineer at my previous company. I think it was just a retention tactic since I was somewhat important to a few major projects at the time. Now I’m a Sr Engineer with less responsibility again and I love it
In the same way that being a CEO means having a broad network of connections even before day 0 of the job.
1. Insulted the company the person has worked for (Irrelevant to the post)
2. Insulted the titles as meaningless (Irrelevant to the post)
3. Talked about Job scope (Irrelevant to the post)
4. Demeaned the promotion (Sour grapes and just nasty)
Now, i get that promotions in corporate environments are always a nasty business - unfair, political, skewed and arbitrary. It doesnt always go to the most deserving.
What this post has done (at least in my experience in the corporate world) is shown how the sausage is made. It is not pretty and a lot of the post dwells on "buy-in", "sponsorship", "relationships", etc because this is how the game is played. I have personally seen it played by both technically competent and technically incompetent people for senior technical roles.
I wish the comments would focus on the contents of the article rather than sounding like a bunch of people tired of corporate shenanigans. I mean, we all are tired of corporate bullshit when it comes to promotion. At a certain point, i decided to stop playing it and decided i am going to effectively "plateau" at that level. But, that gave me leverage i didnt have before which is that i no longer that to do anything i didnt want to do - skip-level ass-kissing, show-boating, etc, etc.
To all aspirants who wish to climb the corporate ladder and reap the benefits (financial, better job prospects, ability to work internationally at higher levels of seniority, better mating chances, better access to higher quality of life services, etc while trading off your time, stress and likely your physical and mental health), this post has solid advice.
So much bitterness and toxicity here, it is even surprising to me.
Sure, in current climate people are upset about economics and whole situation in general, but still it was unpleasant to read comment section here...
As for professional qualities, I don’t think there is one. It takes a staff engineer at FAANG to do what a senior can do at a smaller company, because of all the other self—important people not listening to you. (Dealing with that is a skill though, so having that skill might be it.)
This is beyond laughable. FAANGs are pretty much the only place where staff is actually hard to make.
I see countless "senior" engineers with 3 years of experience in smaller companies.
The truth is it would take a good entry-level FAANG engineer to match a senior engineer in a smaller company.
People have such weird delusions about this. Imagine saying the same thing about the NBA vs your local pick-up games. Literally untenable.
Also I love how you think the Linux kernel is valuable because Linus started it and not because millions of hours have been invested in it by other engineers (most of whom are employed by big corps).
The difference in compensation between NBA and local games is millions to nothing - between FANGs and other company there is a much smaller factor and there are way more perks in some small companies than in FANGs: less politics, no PIPs, remote, low tax / low cost of living locations, no 6m to prepare for an interview, riskier equities (if that's your thing), CTO path, etc.
All my FANGs friends ended up in smaller companies after having marked their CV as ex-Apple or ex-Google.
If I were younger and I was earning less and happy to sacrifice quality of life to live in some big city, I would spend the 6m prep-time and leetcode, just to have the FANG name on my CV and charge more to other businesses later on.
People always say this and yet somehow the markets never align <shrug>
The rest is a strange digression.
I've worked for companies where staff engineer is below senior engineer and for companies where the opposite is true.
And I have worked for a company where everyone is just a staff engineer with no titles to differentiate, liked this setup the best.
There is no industry standard, each company labels things differently.
The definitions are arbitrary and vary - sometimes wildly or completely opposite - from company to company and industry to industry. Some companies don't use titles at all and use levels - which are also arbitrary and differ accordingly.
If you never leave the incestuous Silicon Valley bubble, however, you may never learn this.
A senior in one org may have the responsibilities of the staff in another one, it depends.
Fun fact: at IBM a "Staff" is actually junior to a "Senior". So it's all over the place anyway.
The latest trend in new companies is to not assign named titles at all, just numbered levels.
For example a mid experienced engineer at Nvidia is doing better than a staff engineer at a random tech company because of their millions of dollars gains in Nvidia stocks.
Now you can write all day about being a "staff engineer" in LinkedIn or blog posts and how that is such a big deal blah blah blah. But all that is spam when we measure it with reality (your bank account).
They can call me "junior" or whatever they like, just give me more comp please.
It's a much more natural career path for people with a coding background but some companies, particularly enterprisey ones with lots of bureaucracy, prefer architects.
One tell-tale sign is that the article talks as much about which important contributions "won't get you there" as about which will. Including acknowledging that it's all important! Let all those dumb folks do all that other important stuff, focus selfishly on the hype-of-the-day topics so you can bag that sweet promotion. Relying on that there are many other folks that do the boring and less sexy stuff that keeps the light on. And which is ultimately necessary to lift you into your sweet promotion. Just that you want the credit, not those other folks. I'd be deeply resentful of somebody doing this ego-trip, and therefore, again, I'm glad my place doesn't have this divisive nonsense.
I think this a big contributor to gendered wage gaps
So many people I’ve talked to are worried about how they come across to colleagues in their current organization and are worried about glass ceilings there
While the competition is absolutely coming across as too cocky and too abrasive, but continues interviewing at different companies until it hits, not worried about any ceiling or “terminal titles” at the current organization
If people are playing completely different games, the outcome cant really be compared