| My quality of life as a senior staff eng depends on a couple things. Be curious what others would add: - *good manager*: at my company, I’m paired with a manager over a focus area. If they are good we'll form an effective partnership. They’ll help protect focus time, take on lots of planning and people management work, while I focus on the teams technical leadership and roadmap. -*Important company priority*: if what I’m working on actually matters to the company, we'll get the resources we need to execute. Without this, our team will be frequently poached and we won’t achieve much. - *strong stakeholder relationships*: I regularly meet with and take feedback from stakeholders. They can see where we’re going on a tech level and incorporate us into their plans. We can be an asset to the company’s different, customer facing product lines, not a hermitted group of devs. - *strong inter-disciplinary collaboration*: we have all the disciplines we need on the team. Whether it’s data, UX, eng, or something else, we’re not playing politics to negotiate with another management structure on every little task our team needs. It just gets done a a virtue of this discipline being a teammate... - *A road to prod*: we ship early and ship often. We don’t have anything in our way external to the team for shipping. Also we’re not working on a theoretical thing, it’s actual prod code we help with! -*hiring great people*: we hire amazing people, and usually we don’t have to worry about their quals. Or worry about them being a jerk. Also we meet to ensure they’ll be a good fit for the team. -*a clear area I own*: I want to make sure that if I’m given technical authority over an area, there’s not another overlapping staff/principal eng who’s also expecting to own some of that space. It’s clear what the groupings are and who does what to avoid politics and ego clashes between alpha geeks. -*active burnout prevention*: the culture and management work against my hard-charging style and strongly encourage me to walk away from work during vacations, weekends, and evenings... |
Maybe I'd add a couple things:
* Always learning.
* Visibility and interaction with a broader range of people. For instance I work for a big multi-national, and I greatly enjoy cross site collaborations.