figmntSome reactions to the Staff+ vs. Manager post that trended on HN.
If you're choosing a track based on safety or salary, you're missing the bigger picture that once you pass Senior its mostly the same.
cmgmyrSo many great quotes in this book, but this is one of my favorites. #staffeng @whereistanya
AlmadWith the title inflation, I think my personal definition of Staff is “someone who has the trust of the org to decide about the content of their work by themselves” #staffeng
peter royalthis morning my boss asked me what all i do at work, based upon the last ~year, for some calibration work being done.
i was able to turn around a list of a few dozen things in short order.
how? i keep a daily work log. a single document with a heading per day and some bullet points with the salient parts of the day.
small practices over time are useful. find the ones that work for you.
Alex EarlyMore wisdom from The Staff Engineer's Path: when writing design docs,
"Wrong is better than vague."
If you are specific, a reviewer will immediately know if what you wrote is wrong, whereas if you are vague they wont be able to tell. It's also easier for people to review specifics rather than high-level ideas. This also is good to keep in mind when you are not sure yourself about which direction to take -- just pick one and your team will tell you if it's good or not.
Rakan Dirbas7- To advocate for change, you need to know the change to advocate for. If you aren’t coding anymore it’s hard to find technical problems. Two ways are: 1- sit next to teams to hear when they complain about a problem/service, 2- maintain a list of people who are good in surfacing problems.
#staffengineer #staffeng #seniorsoftwareengineer #softwareengineer #softwaredevelopment #softwaredeveloper #startups #engineering #team #engineer #people #work #leader #culture
Joe SchmittThe more I reflect on it, the more I think the reason I'm miserable is I'm being used as the "Right Hand" #StaffEng archetype, which is literally the only one of the 4 that I very much don't enjoy: https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-archetypes
I gravitate strongly towards being a Solver or Architect, and also enjoy being a Tech Lead when the situation calls for it. But being the Right Hand — especially to an executive — is just not a job I find joy in, and I miss the freedom of finding and driving my own initiatives
Staff archetypes
Most career ladders define a single, uniform set of expectations for Staff engineers operating within the company. Everyone benefits from clear role expectations, but career ladders are a tool that applies better against populations than people. This is particularly true for Staff-plus engineers, whose career ladders often paper over several distinct roles hidden behind a single moniker. The more folks I spoke with about the role of Staff-plus engineers at their company, the better their experiences began to cluster into four distinct patterns. Most companies emphasized one or two of the patterns, and one pattern only existed in companies with many hundreds or thousands of engineers. A few companies didn’t feature any technical leadership pattern and pushed all their experienced engineers towards engineering management. In literature, recurring character patterns are called archetypes, such as the “hero” or the “trickster,” and the archetype term is helpful for labeling these frequent variants of Staff-plus engineers.
JesperI can recommend the recent
Quality Bits Podcast for #QualityCoach, #StaffEng, and principal testers.
- how do you build skills in others
- how much hand on should you be as #StaffLevel #Tester
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Bandwidth to Grow: Supporting Growth and Change with Maaret Pyhäjärvi @maaretp
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2037134/11705424
Bandwidth to Grow: Supporting Growth and Change with Maaret Pyhäjärvi - Quality Bits
In this episode, Lina talks to the feedback fairy, a well-known voice in the testing (and not only) community - Maaret Pyhäjärvi about the different readiness for changes in team and supporting the growth journeys.Find Maaret on: - LinkedIn: https...
Rich Lafferty 🐀other important #StaffEng tasks completed today include: picking a color scheme for some periscope reports
sometimes people wonder what staff engineers do. well, I feel like I staff engineered this afternoon:
I was vaguely aware that a recent change by Team A was putting some load on Team B's ElasticSearch cluster, and then today I overheard someone from Team A asking *Team C* about how to scale up ES.
So now someone's going to prepare a brief backgrounder, then the involved teams are going to meet, understand, and come up with a plan together in which scaling up is just one option!