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Comment by brianstrimp | Hacker News Reader

"as a staff engineer"

Such an unnecessary flex.

It's entirely relevant here. The opinions of a staff engineer on this stuff should be interpreted very differently from the opinions of a developer with much less experience.

Reminds me of TechLead

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbUU-D2Hil0

It's not relevant here, because this is a post from someone who worked on copilot. It's a shady sales pitch, disguised as an engineer's honest opinion.

Not really because "Staff software engineer" has become the new "Senior Software Engineer" due to title inflation. It's become an essentially meaningless distinction at many companies.

Case in point, this person has around around 7 years of professional experience at just two companies, Zendesk and GitHub. I don't mean this as a personal dig in any way (truly) but this simply isn't what we used to mean by a "Staff" level software engineer.

This person is early-mid career, which we used to just call "Software engineer" then "Senior Software Engineer" and now (often enough) "Staff Software Engineer"

They are at a place in their career where it still feels relevant to mention that title.

Exactly. I've been in the business for 20+ years and I think my title is still "Senior Software Engineer".

Not because of lack of skill, but I don't care. I could ask for a fancier one and most likely get it, but why?

Uhhh, I hate to break it to you but titles mean absolutely nothing in this industry.

To be honest I was expecting the article to focus primarily on internal docs, meetings, long Slack posts, etc. Staff engineers spend a relatively small percentage of their time writing code. A lot of what it takes to be successful is knowing how to communicate with different audiences which AI should be really useful for.

What is a Staff engineer anyhow? Sometimes I fell like all these titles and roles pop up all of the sudden to replace already existing ones that were already too boring.

A lot of companies use it for their IC track (Individual Contributir) track, to solve the problem of engineers being forced to move into management because otherwise their career progression stops.

I like this definition (which comes with a whole book): https://staffeng.com/

Not really, once you get past senior the “shape” of staff+ engineers varies greatly. At that level the scope is typically larger which can limit the usefulness of LLMs - I’d agree that the greatest value I’ve gotten is from being able to quickly get up to speed on something I’ve been asked to have an opinion on and sanity checking my work if I’m using an unfamiliar language or framework.

It also helps if you realize staff+ is just a way to financially reward people who don’t want to be managers so you end up with these unholy engineer/architect/project manager/product manager hybrids that have to influence without authority.

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