Computational Matters Blog

[Book] Staff Engineer's Path

06 May 2023

Good Read Book On Expecations,Responsibilites and Opportunities at Staff Engineers.

What is Staff Engineering Level ?

  • three pillars of the technical track: big picture thinking, project execution and positive influence.
  • Context of Decision - Senior Engineers know Good Decision, Context take time and effort
  • staff engineering is a leadership role
    • Teaching
    • Quietly raising everyone’s game
    • Setting technical direction
  • technical judgment will need to include the reality of the business
  • Introvert is OK, Jerk is not
  • Being Influence
    • To be a good influence,need to have high standards for what excellent engineering looks like and model them when you build something
    • Your reviews of code or designs should be instructive for your colleagues and should make your codebase or architecture better
    • When you’re making technical decisions, you need to understand the tradeoffs and help other people understand them too
    • You need to be able to dive into the details where necessary, ask the right questions, and understand the answers

    • When arguing for a particular course of action, or a particular change in technical culture, you need to make sense and you need to be right. So you have to have a solid foundation of technical skills.

    • Coding is not necessarily,goal is to solve problems efficiently, to take on the design or leadership work

    • deep diving through codebases will still remain the most efficient tool to solve many problems. writing documents might get better results, or becoming a master of data analysis, or having a terrifying number of 1:1 meetings. What matters is that the problems get solved, not how

  • autonomy demands responsibility

  • strong communication skills.

Understanding Role

  • Staff Level at each of Experience Level, Director or Manager or VP
  • Reporting “High” and “Low”
  • Broad Scope -> Lack Of Impact, Becoming a bottleneck, Missing Relationship / Mentorship to juniors
    • Choose Area , build Influence, have some success, solve problem there, move to next area
  • Narrow Scope -> Lack of Impact, Opportunity cost,Overshadowing other engineers,Overengineering
    • Areas deep enough to spend whole career, never run out ideas,oppo, check if this is space
  • Defining Job
  • Do you approach things depth-first or breadth-first?
  • Which of the “four disciplines” do you gravitate towards? 1.Core technical skills - Coding 2.Product management - what needs to be done and why 3.Project management - practicalities of achieving the goal, removing chaos , task tracking, blocking, unblocking 4.People management -group of people into a team, building their skills and careers, mentoring
  • How much do you want (or need) to code?
  • How’s your delayed gratification? compiled code as success, work with no builtin feedback
  • Are you keeping one foot on the manager track?
  • Do any of these archetypes fit you?
    1. Tech leads who partner with managers to guide the execution of one or more teams 2.Architects, who are responsible for technical direction and quality across a critical area 3.Solvers, who wade into one difficult problem at a time 4.Right Hands, who add leadership bandwidth to an organization
  • What’s your current mission?

Holder of Three Maps

  • Locator - your place in wider organization - Scope
    • Keep Update
    • Have skip-level 1:1s and ask your manager’s manager what they care about.
    • Face time Talk to customers and team members
  • Topographical Map - Navigate Terrain
    • good ideas don’t get traction
    • won’t find out about the difficult parts until you get there
    • Everything takes longer
    • Keep Update
      • build continuous context
      • Automated announcement lists and channels
      • Walking the floor
      • Making time for reading
      • Checking in with your leadership
      • If the terrain is still difficult to navigate, be a bridge
  • Treasure Map - Where you are going

Creating the Big Picture

  • technical vision describes a future state. technical strategy describes a plan of action
  • Includes - Approach | What to make, is it good? , who is accountable - Writing | Initial Ideas , Research , Share-able? - Launch | Review , Official , revisit at periods
  • state for your architecture, code, processes, technology and teams.
  • Good vision { Simple , intentional , consolidated , inspirational , memorable } from Making Things Happen Book
  • “Kernel of Strategy” From Good Strategy Bad Strategy
    • diagnosis of the problems, a guiding policy, and Coherent actions that will bypass the challenges.
  • Final Question on Strategy or VIsion : “Am i lying to myself on any ?”
  • principles of decision making - Lack of disagreement is more important than agreement - Rough consensus is achieved when all issues are addressed,but not necessarily accommodated - Humming should be the start of a conversation, not the end - Consensus is the path, not the destinatio
  • Telling story in launch

Finite Time , Defend it

  • Focus means sometimes saying no
  • responsible for choosing your own work
  • Liminted Resources Energy+ Happyness + Credibility + Social Capital + Skills
  • Time for Scheduled Workload + Extra Obligations + Calm
  • Which projects should you take?
    • Part-time/Fractional project - DIsconnect from main project
      • Side quest one that unblocks others
      • Diversion
- Always " A bin packing Problem"

Leading Big Projects

  • take on problems that seem intractable
  • Set up the structures that will reduce ambiguity and make it easy to share context
  • There will always be tradeoffs
  • Communicate
  • Expect problems to arise , changes in direction, people quitting, and unavailable dependencies
  • Getting Context, All 3 maps
  • Sucess Metrics
  • RACI, the Responsibility Assignment Matrix.

As Role Model an passive influence

  • Values are what you do
  • Negative Traits - Condscending, impossible to please, never available

  • positive traits - Mature, COnstructive and accountable

    • Building Competence
    • Gaining Knowledge and Experience
    • Build Domain Knowledge and styaying update
  • Self Aware
    • What is known
    • What is unknown
    • Understand Context
  • High Standards - Seek Constructive Critisim - Owning Mistakes - Be reliable
  • Be Responsible - Taking Ownership - Make decisions - Ask obivious questions - No delegation via neglection
  • Taking Charge of Meetings, research about everything
    • Calm
  • Expect Failure
  • optimize for maintainance not for creation
  • Create Future Leaders

References

Related posts