[HN Gopher] Managing Staff-Plus Engineers (2020)
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Managing Staff-Plus Engineers (2020)
Author : coolvision
Score : 85 points
Date : 2021-02-16 14:23 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lethain.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lethain.com)
| rob74 wrote:
| > _Your product manager appreciate your work. Your engineering
| manager is engaging the team. Your peers enjoy working together.
| Your users love your product. Your business loves the adoption._
|
| What company did he have in mind when writing this? And where can
| I apply for a job?
| nomdep wrote:
| Am I the only that find most of these management articles
| extremely condescending?
|
| For example:
|
| "If you aren't giving them weekly feedback, you're delaying their
| growth."
|
| What? Like I'm not capable of improvement whitout my managers
| approval? What is even "growth" in this context?
| neolefty wrote:
| My guess: Someone who is not into management (or not good at
| it) may be powerful when they work on a problem but naturally
| narrowly focused -- management can help them prioritize, see
| the bigger picture, and shift their focus when needed. Autonomy
| and independent critical thought are important, and so is
| relevance to business priorities.
| endtime wrote:
| My interpretation of "growth" in that context is "incremental
| progress towards the next promotion or performance rating
| bucket". And it doesn't say that it doesn't happen without
| feedback, it effectively says that regular feedback helps it
| happen faster.
| pklausler wrote:
| They probably don't mean "incremental progress towards a
| better job elsewhere", and yet that's the real fast track
| (though somewhat less so at the >=Staff level).
| Whitespace wrote:
| "Growth" in this context means impact to and relevance within
| the organization. It's mostly a leadership thing.
|
| Essentially, you don't need to micromanage the work that Staff+
| Engineers do, but it's critical to stream information to them
| throughout the week and sync with them once a week to align and
| calibrate.
|
| If you do this consistently week over week, that engineer will
| flourish within the organization. If not, they'll continue to
| work within their domain until they see no more growth
| opportunities and then they'll leave.
|
| Source: I've been a Principal Engineer for about four years and
| didn't really grow under some managers who left me alone. Once
| I found a manager that consistently invested in me I really
| thrived, and now I'm a Senior Principal Engineer and feel more
| comfortable in my current role than earlier.
| theflyinghorse wrote:
| Sorry, but what is a senior principle engineer? My
| understanding is that as far as engineers go principle is the
| top level - a true technical authority for an organization.
| bratbag wrote:
| I think its a poor turn of phrase. Given the context, I would
| replace delaying with slowing.
|
| We all improve faster with effective feedback loops.
| boringg wrote:
| Well we all learn faster with effective feedback loops.
| Improve depends on what the end goals are defined as and by
| whom.
| [deleted]
| adaml_623 wrote:
| Pity there's no definition of Staff-Plus or even a definition of
| Staff Engineer.
|
| Obviously I'm not in the bubble that uses those titles but an
| author who has an entire domain called staffeng.com should have a
| good definition.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| He has a book on the topic: https://lethain.com//staff-
| engineer/
| tantalor wrote:
| https://staffeng.com/guides/overview-overview
|
| It's basically the track with the same job-level as management
| but different responsibilities.
| joeconway wrote:
| He wrote a book on it https://lethain.com//staff-engineer/
| zuhayeer wrote:
| Staff actually may be a different level depending on company
| you're looking at. There may not be one standard definition
| (though there may be generally agreed upon responsibility). See
| IBM for example, Staff is the second level:
| https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=IBM,Google,Facebook&track=So...
|
| Also this post may be helpful:
| https://www.levels.fyi/blog/what-are-career-levels-ladders.h...
|
| For some rough scope and responsibility at each standard level,
| click on the cells here to get an idea:
| https://levels.fyi/standard/
| abeppu wrote:
| Well, even if the author does provide a definition elsewhere, I
| think the problem is in part that advice is only applicable for
| organizations that agree with that definition. I think the
| actual implications of a "staff" or "principal" job title vary
| meaningfully between organizations, and worse can shift when
| there's a shakeup of senior leadership.
| wwww4all wrote:
| They are HR designations to shift salary ranges for senior
| engineers.
|
| Tech skills top out at senior level, but companies want to be
| able to pay some senior engineers more than average. Without
| affecting the senior level range.
|
| It's also form of title inflation and way to seem like advancing
| in career ladder.
|
| Some companies have to have a growth track, so it's a way to give
| senior level people some form of goal to attain. It's mostly HR
| process than any engineering principle.
| eru wrote:
| > It's also form of title inflation and way to seem like
| advancing in career ladder.
|
| You are right. But if the pay keeps going up (and
| responsibilities too), there are many people who are honestly
| happy with that deal.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Tech skills top out at senior level
|
| Do you not think there's any difference between a senior who
| might be working well at a high level but just within one
| company, and a senior who might be doing work at the very top
| of their entire field worldwide?
| ska wrote:
| If this is true at your organization, you are doing it wrong in
| my opinion.
|
| It's not the only way to do things, but it's quite possible to
| have role and skills for a staff engineer be a strict superset
| of senior engineer.
| nemetroid wrote:
| If I understand correctly, "staff-plus engineer" means "staff
| engineer or above".
| recursive wrote:
| Ok, what's "staff engineer"? Reading the title, I thought it
| would be about managing staff in addition to engineers. That's
| clearly not the case.
|
| On https://staffeng.com/, there is a further clue.
|
| "The transition into Staff Engineer, and its further evolutions
| like Principal Engineer, remains particularly challenging and
| undocumented."
|
| It would appear that "staff engineer" is a hierarchy level
| below principal engineer.
|
| I've been a software developer for damn near 20 years, and I
| don't know what any of this is. Is there a flow chart with
| positions labeled that explains all the "engineer" modifiers?
| [deleted]
| andreygrehov wrote:
| Staff Engineer is the level above Senior Engineer - a pretty
| common title at FAANG-like companies.
|
| Here is a good chart: https://staffeng.com/levels.png
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| Ah so the technical track equivalent of the first real
| manger grade then.
| thebean11 wrote:
| YMMV, at my company senior SWE is parallel to the first
| manager grade.
| [deleted]
| wan23 wrote:
| When I started at Google I asked what Staff Engineer means in
| an orientation meeting and people just laughed at me for not
| knowing. It's weird how people just assume you know some
| things that are specific to a few Silicon Valley companies.
| enneff wrote:
| That's weird. When I asked they showed me the job ladder
| definitions that explain the expectations of a Staff SWE.
| [deleted]
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Usually there's a pecking order loosely based on the
| historical Bell Labs hierarchy.
|
| "Staff" is usually a notch below a principal. Usually a
| principal is expected to demonstrate technical leadership and
| comp. In some companies I've observed there may be a narrower
| funnel to principal and another notch where you get more
| stock or compensation.
| dhdhhdd wrote:
| I guess depends on the company? Google staff is a good
| principal at msft
|
| Edit: in Google principal is above staff too, it's just
| that msft partner is Google principal, and msft principal
| is Google staff. lol
| drewcoo wrote:
| That verbiage means that principle engineer is staff engineer
| by another name.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| It depends who you ask.
|
| The commonly held belief is that it is the advancement of the
| tech track ladder. So that you can have more responsibility
| but without becoming a [people] manager. So in this pretend
| world, staff plus engineers can dictate technical and
| architectural direction, and perhaps corral resources, of the
| company without being a manager. You are expected to make
| decisions that can affect everyone "under" you. For example,
| you might dictate (either by coercion or persuasion, depends
| on the company as much as your own style) migration to React
| or some other crap, from whatever current crap you are using.
| Or decide code style, and write or cause to be written,
| enforcement tools for such.
|
| But more cynically, and as I believe, it's a way to pay long
| time employees, that hold critical tribal knowledge, more
| money. The title has become pretty disconnected from
| authority/responsibility, even at Google.
|
| If you search for [principal engineer], you'll find some
| different thoughts on staff plus leveling.
|
| It's quite common terminology, so I'm pretty surprised after
| 20 years you'd have no idea. You must be in a pretty
| insulated bubble.
| recursive wrote:
| > You must be in a pretty insulated bubble.
|
| Maybe. It feels more like I'm outside the bubble though.
| I've never worked for a SV-type company or big tech.
| Through my career, I've worked at small companies or those
| that aren't primarily tech. None of those had any of these
| titles. And I really think that represents the majority of
| companies outside "the bubble".
| adaml_623 wrote:
| It's above senior but before principal. It's not rocket
| science!
|
| (Maybe if you work for SpaceX ....)
| MSM wrote:
| It's different depending on the company.
|
| https://www.levels.fyi/ has a breakdown for some of the
| largest companies but I typically think of it as:
|
| Eng -> Senior -> Staff -> Principal -> Distinguished
|
| with my simple explanation being:
|
| Eng - Able to contribute to the team
|
| Senior - Expert on the team
|
| Staff - Expert in your organization
|
| Principal - Expert in your domain
|
| Distinguished - ?? - Seems to be that you damn near created
| your domain. I only see these at the largest companies and a
| lot of times it's folks that have created popular programming
| languages or frameworks that the company themselves use.
| Hydraulix989 wrote:
| Distinguished means expert in the field. The distinguished
| engineer I knew who worked at Cisco contributed to the
| TCP/IP protocol and also basically built their first
| router.
| monocasa wrote:
| Wait, Cisco stole it's first router, with the founders
| being forced to resign from Stanford as part of how the
| criminal charges got dropped.
|
| Or are you talking about the Stanford Blue Box?
| Hydraulix989 wrote:
| I am referring to Bill :)
|
| On a side note, maybe the reason why every major company
| here has accusations of stealing ideas is that it's much
| easier to accuse someone than it is to actually take a
| real risk and build a successful product and business
| around it... I struggle to think of someone good who
| doesn't also have an unwarranted accusation against them
| (Carmack being the most recent example).
|
| Outlawing non-competes made this Valley, and people here
| largely value freedom of innovation and execution over
| rent seeking of someone else's mind and ideas. Culturally
| speaking, this is the West Coast hacker ethos to a tee.
| Bringing suits, regulations, and lawyers to the party
| will only lead to our demise.
| monocasa wrote:
| Accusations?
|
| They openly stole Bill Yaeger's work, and never denied
| it. Bill wasn't an early employee of Cisco.
|
| We're not talking about non-competes here, we're talking
| about taking source code and board designs verbatim and
| just swapping out the copyright assignments and adding
| "Cisco". All of this pontificating about trying tear
| people down who dared to take a risk is really gross in
| that context.
| Hydraulix989 wrote:
| Yikes. Where can I read more about this? I wasn't able to
| dig anything up myself readily through online searching.
| If this is indeed the case, then you are absolutely
| right, and I would even fully redact what I said.
|
| Edit: Yes, you're right, what a sad story :( and of
| course it is largely covered up to the point where people
| can easily be mistaken about it.
| donretag wrote:
| Senior: we need to give them a promotion, but with no new
| responsibilities.
| delaynomore wrote:
| It more like "I need a promotion to make sure my
| compensation keeps up but with no new responsibilities!"
| MSM wrote:
| At many companies that's how you could define all the
| roles!
| madhadron wrote:
| The exact job title sequence varies a bit, but a useful
| division I have seen is: first you're told what to do. Then,
| as a senior engineer, you're told what problem to solve and
| what you do is up to you. Then, as a principal/staff/etc.
| you're expected to decide which problems to solve.
| gen220 wrote:
| Staff engineer means "you are now or have at some point in
| the past been an indispensable senior engineer at a
| fashionable tech company (this company inclusive)".
|
| Principal engineer means "you've made a lot of money, so you
| don't need to work for money any more, but we'd like to have
| you around so that our staff engineers have someone to look
| up to".
|
| This is obviously an incomplete/slightly tongue in cheek
| definition. The people playing these roles, of course, have a
| lot of "real" work to do. But there are a lot of senior
| people who are highly productive without these titles (like
| yourself, it seems).
|
| Therefore, there's a bit of an insecurity people carrying
| these titles are prone to, since it distinguishes them (and
| usually their salaries, to a highly significant degree) from
| their colleagues with equivalent years of experience and
| technical talent. Hence the websites you describe, where
| people try to make sense of the divergent path they find
| themselves in.
|
| The titles themselves have been copied from Google, I
| believe. You can view them at https://levels.fyi
| fatnoah wrote:
| >Principal engineer means "you've made a lot of money, so
| you don't need to work for money any more, but we'd like to
| have you around so that our staff engineers have someone to
| look up to".
|
| Having been a "Principal Engineer" at a large tech company,
| that wasn't my full experience. Yes, the pay was great, but
| the role was more about driving large, multi-team and
| discipline projects. Client, server, security, etc. all at
| once.
|
| Coasting was absolutely possible, since none of my managers
| (of the three I had there) had similar levels of
| engineering experience nor did they seem particularly
| interested in anything except whether things were on
| schedule or not. In that time, I did have face time with
| multiple folks at C-level and EVP level. Those folks
| actually did get it and understand the value of the work,
| it was the middle management that had the gap.
| gen220 wrote:
| I'm sorry that I came off as belittling these roles. They
| are valuable, and I didn't mean to imply that coasting
| was a norm. The principals and staff engineers I've known
| have been brilliant technical minds.
|
| I was attempting to describe how somebody with 20 years
| of quality IC experience (OP) could have steered
| inadvertently away from the Staff+ path. I admit that I
| didn't do Principal justice, I was merely trying to
| distinguish it from Staff (since they're fairly similar
| job descriptions).
|
| To redo that attempt: Staff+ opportunities go to people
| with leverage ("indispensable senior engineer", "made
| enough money to retire early") and interest (choosing to
| continue working, choosing to take on the title), who are
| working in the subsection of the industry that chooses to
| _cede_ leverage to engineers.
|
| There aren't a lot of them to go around, compared to the
| number of qualified engineers, so a lot of the initial
| qualifications are circumstantial. I don't think the fact
| that they're circumstantial (everything is
| circumstantial, after all) takes away from their ability
| to drive big positive change in an org, and the pride one
| should take in that. _Somebody_ has to do it!
| fatnoah wrote:
| Hah, I didn't take offense. I've seen and worked with
| quite a few Principals where I questioned what they
| actually did. Lots of them produced many documents and
| zero results and coasted based on that.
| WJW wrote:
| And then after those comes "Distinguished
| engineer/Engineering Fellow", which basically means: "You
| are famous enough that we pay you mostly to get a shiny
| halo effect from employing you. If you also solve some
| actual problems, yes please." People like Guido van Rossum
| and Simon Peyton Jones would fall into this bracket.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Realistically, Staff Engineer is a higher level engineering
| title given out to Individual Contributors (non-managers) to
| give them career paths outside of management. This is
| designed to solve the issue where very senior engineers run
| out of growth room and are effectively forced into management
| against their will and with occasional disastrous results.
| There are often a few titles around "Staff" too, such as
| principal or architect.
|
| Think of them like an architect who codes a bit more.
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