[pockmarked19]

The staff title unlocks a new level of self-aggrandizement which is on display here and in certain published books.

As for professional qualities, I don’t think there is one. It takes a staff engineer at FAANG to do what a senior can do at a smaller company, because of all the other self—important people not listening to you. (Dealing with that is a skill though, so having that skill might be it.)

[iLoveOncall]

> It takes a staff engineer at FAANG to do what a senior can do at a smaller company

This is beyond laughable. FAANGs are pretty much the only place where staff is actually hard to make.

I see countless "senior" engineers with 3 years of experience in smaller companies.

The truth is it would take a good entry-level FAANG engineer to match a senior engineer in a smaller company.

[stavros]

The GP is saying that FAANG companies need staff engineers to navigate the politics enough to achieve the same level of productivity as a senior engineer in a small company.

[i_am_a_peasant]

i don’t see why the size of the company one works for has to be correlated with an engineer’s skill level. i’ve seen some of the best programmers i ever met cone out of 10 years working at a small company because it happened to be closer to his kid’s school route.

[almostgotcaught]

> i don’t see why the size of the company one works for has to be correlated with an engineer’s skill level

People have such weird delusions about this. Imagine saying the same thing about the NBA vs your local pick-up games. Literally untenable.

[jokethrowaway]

I'm sure there are exceptions (and it's way more likely that the very top are in FANGs, maybe the distinguished engineers making millions per year?) but I was never particularly impressed with the level of skills of average FANGs people.

The difference in compensation between NBA and local games is millions to nothing - between FANGs and other company there is a much smaller factor and there are way more perks in some small companies than in FANGs: less politics, no PIPs, remote, low tax / low cost of living locations, no 6m to prepare for an interview, riskier equities (if that's your thing), CTO path, etc.

All my FANGs friends ended up in smaller companies after having marked their CV as ex-Apple or ex-Google.

If I were younger and I was earning less and happy to sacrifice quality of life to live in some big city, I would spend the 6m prep-time and leetcode, just to have the FANG name on my CV and charge more to other businesses later on.

[almostgotcaught]

> but I was never particularly impressed with the level of skills of average FANGs people.

People always say this and yet somehow the markets never align <shrug>

The rest is a strange digression.

[i_am_a_peasant]

Sports and programming just aren't comparable. Some finnish student wrote the linux kernel my man, while living with his parents.

[almostgotcaught]

Have you ever heard the expression "the exception that proves the rule"?

Also I love how you think the Linux kernel is valuable because Linus started it and not because millions of hours have been invested in it by other engineers (most of whom are employed by big corps).

[soulofmischief]

You've missed the point. OP is discussing affordance, not skill. A senior engineer at a smaller company may have equal or less skill than a staff engineer at a larger company, but they have more affordance if there are less cogs in the bureaucratic machine that need oiling whenever they need to get something done. Experience in a variety of workplaces will give you the same intuition.

[icedchai]

So true. During the dot-com boom, I was a "senior" engineer 2 years out of school.