Why?
At most technology companies, you’ll reach Senior Software Engineer—the career level—in five to eight years. At that point, your path branches, and you have the opportunity to pursue engineering management or continue down the path of technical excellence to become a Staff Engineer.
Over the past few years we’ve seen a flurry of books unlocking the engineering manager career path, like Camille Fournier’s The Manager’s Path, Julie Zhuo’s The Making of a Manager, and my own An Elegant Puzzle. The management career isn’t an easy one, but increasingly there is a map available.
The transition into Staff Engineer—and its further evolutions like Principal Engineer—remains particularly challenging and undocumented. What are the skills you need to develop to reach Staff Engineer? What skills do you need to succeed after you’ve reached it? How do most folks reach this role? What can companies do to streamline the path to Staff Engineer? Will you enjoy being a Staff Engineer or toil for years for a role that doesn’t suit you?
What?
The StaffEng project aims to collect the stories of folks who are operating in Staff, Principal, or Distinguished Engineer roles. How did you get there? What were your lucky breaks? How did you learn to be effective?
These stories will establish role models for folks hoping to become Staff Engineers. Further, the “metadata” around these stories will help create transparency into the most effective ways to navigate this career path.
Finally, I hope to use those learnings to craft a small number of resources to help others draft their own map to Staff Engineer. What should you do in the first ninety days as a Staff Engineer? What are the highest leverage activities? What should you stop doing? What are the resources you can rely upon? Hopefully, we can provide good resources for all of this.
Who am I?
I’m Will Larson, typically found writing on Irrational Exuberance. Staff Engineer is my second book, and I’ve also written An Elegant Puzzle, and The Engineering Executive’s Primer. Working in the technology industry for almost two decades, I’ve had the opportunity to serve as CTO at several companies, including Carta and Calm.
I’ve been fortunate to work with and coach a number of wonderful Staff-plus engineers, but I’ve always been a bit uncertain whether my advice was any good. I knew what I thought I needed from the team I was supporting, but was my approach effective? Was I helping their careers or guiding them towards submerged rocks that I couldn’t quite see?
This project came out of the desire to have a clearer understanding of the Staff-plus role, to ensure organizations I work with or support create room for those roles, and to make me a better coach to the Staff-plus engineers I’m fortunate enough to work with.