[teaearlgraycold]

How does he get away with doing almost nothing? Why can't he be fired?

[jnwatson]

Lots of staff devs do nothing but coordinate and plan technology.

[drewbeck]

"A lot of staff devs do nothing but critical organizational work"

[eddsh1994]

> Lots of staff devs do nothing but coordinate and plan technology.

"coordinate and plan technology" can be a huge amount of effort, vastly greater than "nothing".

[riskable]

That's not "doing nothing" it's "doing bureaucracy" and IMHO it's a lot more mentally exhausting than coding.

Imagine if every hour of every work day in your calendar is full of various forms of "planning" meetings. How are you supposed to write code and attend all this nonsense at the same time? You can't.

To be fair it sure feels like doing nothing but employers consider it necessary and a job that only senior people can handle.

[yunwal]

I've been in one of these jobs before, and it's certainly exhausting. I'm not necessarily convinced it's useful though. It always seemed like a lot of planning and replanning of work that prevented anything from actually getting done.

[dceddia]

It seems like a lot of replies to this are reading it as "Lots of staff devs do nothing; they just coordinate and plan technology".

Another way to read this is as saying coordination and planning are the job. They "do nothing but", as in "only do".

[jnwatson]

Exactly. I'm staff at Google.

[fknorangesite]

> Lots of staff devs do nothing but their jobs.

[khazhoux]

Yes. But some senior devs actually do very little, for a number of reasons.