[alexjplant]

Depends on the company. Staff can mean somebody who...

- Has very specific domain expertise in an area critical to the company

- Can work across the stack and get a project done from 0 to 1 without throwing their hands up in defeat when they can't plow through it with SO/Copilot

- Gets a bunch of stuff out the door that management cares about

- Acts as technical lead on large cross-team initiatives

There's basically no consistency from company to company as to which of these truly qualifies somebody as Staff-level. As I'm so fond of pointing out there are places that call every non-Junior person a "Principal Engineer" and places that hire 24-year-olds as "Senior". Titles simply aren't fungible across companies. Show an Amazon employee this comment and they'll say that those first 3 are expected of a Senior engineer. I similarly was doing a lot of 2, 3, and 4 at a company that flat-out refused to promote me to Senior because I didn't meet some arbitrary HR criteria that they cooked up decades prior.

At this point I don't care what somebody calls me as long as I get paid market value to do things in a smart way with people that are well-intentioned.