[funnyfoobar]

I can resonate with this a lot as I am a newly minted Staff Engineer.

You really need to block the times to focus, so you hopefully still get to solve some interesting things.

Most of my time is spent on setting the direction, cross team collaboration, managing different stakeholders in the higher, backlog refinements and pre-refinements. I tend to pick up small 1 point story tickets which are not on the critical path to stay in touch with ground reality.

You also have to be an adult in the room, even though you are not wrt age. Got to deal with kindness and patience.

[dopeboy]

Loved your phrasing here around “ground reality”. I do the same partly because I miss coding but mostly because I don’t want the code base to get away from me.