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by brianm
1123 days ago
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Most companies, in my experience, don't actually know how to make use of Staff+ engineers. I spent years at a medium sized public "tech" company just trying to help the company change engineering enough to make use of these folks, and we go to a place where we could... mostly. FANG and FANG-model (anyone copying FANG engineering/product model) companies do it well and have the bulk of success cases. Look for engineering-lead companies first, product lead companies second. A key question when interviewing is "how is the roadmap established?" You want answers where senior leadership establishes goals (strategic or metric), product provides their understanding of opportunities, and engineering decides what to actually do. Even then, there will be the common failure model of EMs doing the roadmapping, not senior (staff+) ICs, but you can tease apart how that works, as it is always going to be a mix. |
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Absolutely spot on. Making use of Staff+ engineers requires giving them a hard problem that would catapult your company forward if it were solved, and a ton of autonomy in how they go about it. Give them dedicated time to prepare presentations on what they're doing and what they've learned recently. Give them dedicated time to mentor other staff members. Give them a routine, but not a schedule. Stop asking them for so many fucking estimates. Give them access to support staff. And then get your fucking hands off them and let them veritably radiate value to your company.
All of this is, of course, antithetical to whichever imposter-syndrome micro-managing MBA vice president happens to have landed in the chair that gives them authority over these people in their never-ending game of Management Musical Chairs. No fucking way are they going to let some grunt just work on a hard problem without constantly getting in their way, nagging them about pointless deadlines and bullshit estimates, and showing visual progress via good-looking DOM elements so they can take credit for it and get Business Points before their 2-year tenure in that chair is up and they move to Head of Brand Awareness or wherever. No: doing so would reveal that their entire position is literally pointless. Can't have that.