[genmaicha123]

I have been wondering the same, and then I stumbled upon one possible answer. There's never any good in generalizing from a single data point, but it offers something I didn't see in other comments.

A Senior frontend engineer at $FAANG I have been talking to recently is struggling with growing into a Staff engineer. They don't want to move away away from user-facing stuff. At the same time, the organization tends to recognize only broad, foundational, cross-team work as Staff-worthy. They are now at a junction: 1) Work on features and stay at current level and in a few years get the "you've been here long enough" promo 2) Build common set of libraries and tools that will be used across multiple teams and get the promo much sooner. Latter is much more aligned with organization's view of "Staff". Although many factors are at play, it's interesting to note that Platform/Infra teams in these companies often more top-heavy than say frontend teams, meaning they have more Staff+ people.

Combining this with what others have been mentioning (stack being approachable, and many people starting their careers in this space) and one can see how anyone with more than a few years of experience in the field is strongly incentivized to build guardrails, and libraries, and whatnot.

Being someone who started as a frontend dev 10 or so years ago and quickly transitioned to backend and finally infra, I will say that fundamental technical challenges on the frontend are little easier to comprehend than the ones in say backend / distributed systems / databases / infra. Combined with huge influx of people, it might just mean there's not enough true problems to solve, so we (re)invent some.

[derwiki]

Is “You’ve been here long enough” really true? I’m at diet-FAANG and it’s certainly not true. Same push to build common libraries instead of features.

[genmaicha123]

From what I have seen. I think it’s fairly frequently that an EM runs out of people to put up for promo based purely on merit. When that happens they reach out for folks with tenure in the team. After all, big part of EM’s own promo packet is how many of their reports did they promote.

Another thing is that folks who stick around long enough end up acquiring almost archeological knowledge of systems involved which can be a strong incentive to retain them, for example by awarding a promotion even if they don’t tick many of the “Staff boxes”.

Besides that, I have seen attrition being another cause for these types of promotions. When a Staff TL leaves, it will create a void that an organization often fills by promoting the next most tenured Senior engineer.

As always, FAANGs are huge orgs and these generalizations do not reflect any and all experiences folks might have.