Staff Engineer
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Average rating4
At most technology companies, you'll reach Senior Software Engineer, the career level for software engineers, in five to eight years. At that career level, you'll no longer be required to work towards the next pro? motion, and being promoted beyond it is exceptional rather than ex? pected. At that point your career path will branch, and you have to decide between remaining at your current level, continuing down the path of technical excellence to become a Staff Engineer, or switching into engineering management. Of course, the specific titles vary by company, and you can replace "Senior Engineer" and "Staff Engineer" with whatever titles your company prefers.Over the past few years we've seen a flurry of books unlocking the en? gineering management career path, like Camille Fournier's The Man? ager's Path, Julie Zhuo's The Making of a Manager, Lara Hogan's Re? silient Management and my own, An Elegant Puzzle. The manage? ment career isn't an easy one, but increasingly there are maps avail? able for navigating it.On the other hand, the transition into Staff Engineer, and its further evolutions like Principal and Distinguished Engineer, remains chal? lenging and undocumented. What are the skills you need to develop to reach Staff Engineer? Are technical abilities alone sufficient to reach and succeed in that role? How do most folks reach this role? What is your manager's role in helping you along the way? Will you enjoy being a Staff Engineer or you will toil for years to achieve a role that doesn't suit you?"Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track" is a pragmatic look at attaining and operate in these Staff-plus roles.
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Great information, but a substantial portion is interviews which can become repetitive when reading too much at once.
A very interesting book if you intend to follow the technical leadership track and are not really into management. This is a career I want to follow and helped me have a clear understanding of how staff+ engineers can operate in an organization.
Each engineer's story was a little different because each organization requires different skills to solve their specific problems, but the ones that caught my attention were related to engineering sponsorship, technical vision & strategy, a lot of collaboration, and leadership.
Most of the stories and content are in Will's blog: https://staffeng.com
Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track is a book with decent content but a terrible format. If you consume this book as an audiobook or paperback, you will likely find it lacking and inconvenient. At its best, the book offers practical insights about building engineering strategies or effectively presenting initiatives to executives. At its worst, the book flings you onto external blog posts, usually Will's own, to get to the juicy stuff. The rest of the book is padded with Staff+ engineer stories (interviews) that look like a disproportionally lengthy appendix.
How you engage with the book will highly depend on the expectations. I was expecting a guided experience with Staff engineer stories or situations mixed in-between. Frankly, this was more or less the case in some chapters. However, when I reached the stories part, the engagement dropped. Plaughing through the same question/answer format of a dozen Staff+ engineers felt like a chore. This fact is exarcerbated by realizing that parts of the stories are already included in the first part of the book anyway! I think Will Larson was on the right track when taking excerpts of the stories and combining them into educated, experience based deductions. I wish there was more of it throughout the book.
Overall, if you take the book in isolation, not knowing what's put out there already by Will Larson himself or others, it can be a decent read. However, when you realize that the book is a series of guides and stories stitched together from StaffEng, it is clear the book does not offer much extra.
