Staff Engineer

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.