Getting the title where you are | Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track<br>The best advice I’ve heard is that often reaching Staff is a combination of luck, timing, and work.<br>- Bert Fan
Most technology companies have a “career level,” which is intended to be the highest level that most folks achieve. Senior engineer is the career level at most companies. While you might get let go for not moving from entry-level engineer to mid-level engineer quickly enough,<br>most companies have no expectation that you’ll ever go from Senior to Staff.<br>Six years at mid-level? Ah, that’s a problem.<br>Twenty years at Senior? Sure, that’s fine.<br>More than the expectation of progress going away, companies’ promotion systems<br>will often impede your further progress once you attain the career level.<br>Sometimes the folks who already have Staff engineer titles are protective<br>of diluting their prestige.<br>In other cases, organizations may be wary of having multiple Staff engineers on a single team<br>due to team health or budgetary concerns.<br>However, I think the strongest source of friction is that<br>the nature of the job changes. A Staff engineer isn’t a better Senior engineer,<br>but someone who’s moved into fulfilling one of the Staff archetypes.<br>Even after you’ve developed the prerequisite skills to become a Staff engineer, there will still be one last hurdle: getting your company to grant you the Staff title. For some, this process is a relative non-event, perhaps taking one or two cycles longer than anticipated but ultimately succeeding, and for others, it may not happen at all at their current company. About two-thirds of the Staff engineers I surveyed attained their title as a promotion at the company they were already working at, and the remaining third changed companies to attain the title.<br>If pursuing that sort of role is your goal, then take the promotion to your career level as an opportunity to reset your approach to navigating your career. From that point onward, there is no standard path to follow. The promotion and performance system will no longer be designed around attaining a timely promotion and may, at times, take on the feel of gatekeeping.<br>To go further, you will have to take more deliberate control of your progression, and this chapter shares the tools that have worked for folks who’ve made the progression ahead of you.<br>Finding your trail<br>If you’ve been relying on your manager to steer your career up to this point, the transition to a self-directed career can feel rather abrupt.<br>There are many books about managing your software career,<br>but most focus from your first job until you reach Senior engineer.<br>Few focus on managing your career beyond the Senior title,<br>which is where this chapter focuses:<br>Your promotion packet is your foundational tool to demystify the Staff promotion, prioritize the right personal development to ensure you get there and activate your internal sponsors and network in support of your progression<br>There is a widespread belief that moving into a Staff-plus role requires successfully completing a Staff project . This section discusses the reality that most Staff engineers do not have a Staff project but also describes how to approach one if you’re at a company that does require them<br>A frequent complaint from engineers is that they’re not “in the room” where decisions happen, and they’re usually right: there is a room, and they’re not in it. What’s less frequently acknowledged is that you’re probably not in the room for a good reason. This section describes how to get into the room, and also how to stay there<br>Finally, you won’t get promoted if your company’s leadership doesn’t know who you are. How do you become visible internally without hogging all the oxygen?<br>Apply these techniques consistently, and you’ll be on the way towards a Staff title, although even the best-laid plans falter if you’re conducting them at the wrong company.<br>Opportunity is unevenly distributed<br>One inconvenient reality you’ll encounter in pursuit of a Staff role is that<br>opportunity at any given company is unevenly distributed.<br>If your company leadership views infrastructure engineering as inherently<br>“more complex” or “more leveraged” than product engineering, then<br>opportunity will consolidate within infrastructure teams.<br>If you work in an organization that emphasizes shipping features,<br>then it will be easier to be rewarded for fixing an outage you cause<br>than preventing future outages.<br>Your work will be more visible if you work in your company’s headquarters than in a distributed office.<br>Many companies believe they have a vested interest in pretending opportunity is evenly distributed, even when it clearly isn’t.<br>This makes it hard to have conviction these dynamics exist,<br>but the trends become clear as you collect more data.<br>Once...