Questions + Answers
Unanswered items from our panel chat
About a week and a half ago, me and some of my closest internet dev and data nerd friends got together and did a panel about our paths and experiences as Staff level folk in tech.
, , , and I spoke panel style with Rahul moderating (video if you missed it!), and we did some Q&A with attendees (this video was just published!). You probably think that this event has already been milked for all it’s worth. You’re right. It was a great event and we put a lot into it. Lest you think that I might stop, I’m here to dispel such a ridiculous notion.How could I spin this gold into… slightly lower purity gold? Like 24k down to maybe 17k. I’ll tell you! I asked Rahul to pull the chat log, and I’ve parsed it for questions that didn’t get addressed. Now I’ll try to answer them. I stripped the names off, but if someone wants to “take credit” for any of them they are welcome to in the comments.
Here we go! Q’s are questions, A’s are my answers!
Q: If you’re trying to make it to staff level at a large companies, does this mean you should avoid startups?
A: You have to get experience and grow. It doesn’t have to be at large companies, but you may have to “catch up” on certain elements that you may miss at smaller companies. Sometimes that’s scale, i.e. you may be used to per-customer sites in a B2B setting, and each has 100-1000 concurrent users, while in big tech the scale might be 100s, or 10s of 1000s of times that. Or for Gmail, a million times that. Sometimes it’s process or other compliance that you didn’t have to face. Your ability to design and build software, and lead teams, doesn’t have to be honed only in a big company. You will grow faster, in my experience, in a big tech company… but if the startup is seeded with a lot of similarly skilled engineers, it’s less of a concern. Avoid places you don’t grow, whatever size of the company.
Q: Primary difference in abilities and responsibilities as a senior vs staff software engineer?
A: This will vary slightly from company to company, but senior should be leading and strongly influencing their team, familiar with adjacent teams’ work and providing input as needed, and at least aware of org-wide goings-on (org generally being a director’s reporting tree). For Staff, this steps up to more strategic team planning (not only giving tactical direction for today, but strategic direction for future halves or years) for your team, leading projects that span multiple teams, and spearheading org-wide initiatives (engineer experience, technology adoption, migration, etc). Abilities don’t really change in terms of behavior, it’s about scope. Lead more people, impact larger organization structures, look at longer time horizons.
Q: What are the key traits someone at a senior level will need to go to staff level?
A: See above immediately above. The traits are operating at the larger scope. I think the most key trait, really, is believing you can solve problems and just do it. Stop waiting for someone to tell you you’re allowed to do important things.
Q: Often staff ICs create/find their own scope and problems, but seniors still need to work on what they’ve been asked to work on. How do you do both while working toward promotion? (Similar enough to another: Q: If you are working on tickets assigned to you, how do you "jump" into doing something like that?, and a third Q: Can we do all of this within a regular workday, without committing x extra hours, while meeting all your priorities and commitments?)
A: What is often true is that at big tech companies, you have to do two jobs for some duration to get promoted. It doesn’t mean you work 80 hours or something, but it generally means being good enough at delegation, prioritization, and focus to deliver your own work items more quickly. You then have to be identifying the important work, writing up the proposal, building support organically, selling it to leadership, and making it your day job so you don’t have to juggle both. That isn’t always as doable, so still getting efficient, but working on an internal tool (per Rahul’s advice) that solves a major pain point, and getting through a phase one-ish version. When value is proven, promoting this to a team/community owned project then gets you more support and visibility.
Q: Can you elaborate on “how to step in when needed”?
A: I am guessing this was mentioned aloud in the panel. I’ll do my best and say that you have to be able to discern what things NEED your input, and asserting that input in a way it can be heard to the key parties. It doesn’t mean commandeering ownership, or telling people how wrong they are, but making sure you don’t stand back and watch the car crash happen.
Q: When discussing leadership is there a difference between a group of 3 vs a group of 6 with respect to what justifies a staff promotion?
A: Directly leading a team (as a manager, hybrid team lead/manager, or as formal or informal team lead) of 3 vs. 6 may not matter much. It is about what is being delivered. There is also a breadth/depth thing where leading a larger team and directing their work effectively on multiple projects shows different impact than coding and directing the work very closely for a smaller group to deliver something significant. I don’t think there is a minimum team size, but often the criticality of the work ends up tracking to more people involved.
Q: People often mention that speaking to non technical audiences is an essential skill, can you give any advice on how to develop this skill to the level required by a staff engineer?
A: Get help. Ideally from someone really good at this. A TPM friend, or engineer you’ve seen do this well, or an eng manager that manages out to non-tech stakeholders… someone that leaves a positive impression when they do this. If you don’t know who that is, check with people that fit this audience. Maybe it’s biz dev stakeholders, or non-tech PMs, whoever… and ask them who from your engineering org engages with them clearly and effectively. Shadow them when they present, or at least read their documents. What parts do they leave out completely, which do they mention at a high level, and when do they really dig into the detail? Get their feedback and feedback from a member of the audience before you send a doc or present and really take it to heart, and adapt. If you don’t think you can extemporaneously speak at the right level, you may need notes that have key words or translations of harrier topics you’re avoiding. Otherwise, just do it. Explain it to a willing friend to see if they follow, and if not find out why.
Q: From your experience in FAANG, what is a good plan to position myself for getting a promotion? IE what is valued most at a given level?
A: Find out what’s required at the next level from leveling guidelines, or other role documents. That should tell you exactly what’s valued. Talk to people that have promoted people to your target level, or someone that has been promoted to it. Analyze gaps, close them. The general changes as you move up is leadership and scope.
Q: You have worked on some projects that are not going anywhere. How can you make them fruitful for yourselves and turn them into your career path?
A: Kill the project. Justify killing it, identify what should be done instead, and do that. Recovering engineering resources from a failing project that cannot possibly be salvaged is extremely valuable. If it’s unkillable, you be the person that changes it from endless slog, to organized, monotonically progressing project that yields value. If you can’t, leave the team or company if they won’t take you off the project, or see it through but accept it won’t be a benefit to your career growth.
Q: I've worked only at startups and I really have trouble putting my accomplishments into % improve this or that. Most of the things are new initiatives.
A: You aren’t creating a new service or API that unlocks X behavior, and it was done in Y days (22% faster than average) while providing a framework to accelerate other similar additions by 10%? You didn’t reduce the latency of this thing by 12% at P50? You aren’t ensuring that your service can scale to Z? There are always numbers. If it was done faster, or had lower latency, or supported more users, or… one of those things is valuable, measure against it.
Q: How do you find a balance between individual contributions and team/leadership contribution?
A: You have to judge what’s needed most right now. This isn’t the same week to week. You may choose to spend 10-15 hours as a baseline for each per week, then flex the remaining hours to where they are needed.
Q: Are there heuristics or questions we can ask to find or discover these promising bets that can turn into impactful projects?
A: If this isn’t fixed/done, what is the cost? If you do, what’s the benefit? How many users or fellow engineers will be impacted? How do any of these compare to competing priorities?
Q: How important was having a good manager in your journey to reach staff?
A: If we stopped the question after “manager”, the answer would be the same. A good manager is immensely valuable. Everything is easier with a strong, supportive partner. You will have to do a lot more on your own that aren’t otherwise a huge part of your job to get promoted.
Q: It seems like so much of success and promotion is being mentored by the right people. How can we identify who is a good mentor within/outside an org?
A: Make your case for being a good mentee first. What do you want, why do you want help with it, what have you done to resolve already, what will you continue to do. Make it easy for someone to want to help. From there, outside of your directors org is best for avoiding bias, at least outside of your senior manager’s tree. Otherwise “how to know if someone will be a good mentor” is pretty hard. Ask around. Find out from managers you know outside your org who would benefit from being a mentor, and that they trust to do it well.
Q: Currently I am a mid level engineer. In your opinion, starting today, what definitive steps should I take so that I get promoted to a Staff Engg. In a reasonable timeframe?
A: “Reasonable timeframe” isn’t very easy to determine. Starting today, find the gap between your behavior and being senior. Fill the gaps, get help. Lead a project, or a hackathon, or a small migration initiative. Be a buddy/mentor to more junior people. Ask your manager if there’s specific things they’re doing you could do or help with.
Q: "Finding scope" is usually associated with business analysis.. So a staff engineering should intersect with skills usually associated with business analysis ?
A: You may develop some BA skills, but you should have some intuition, and a very good relationship with BAs or PMs that can help you with the specifics.
Q: In your opinion, what are the main skills that a Staff should focus on sharing in an interview process?
A: Experience working with complex systems, how many users they had, and why you were critical to its success. People leadership through direct management, team lead activities, mentorship, or any other high impact activity that improves the lives of those you support.
Q: A lot of times, even though I am able to find few top org issues and potential solutions for them, I am not motivated enough to solve it personally. I struggle with finding that top problem that also interests me.
A: Is this a good org for you if the biggest/hardest problems don’t interest you? Is there a gap or something missing that would interest you? Having interesting work is important, and there are times you do what is needed.
Q: Any tips for while you’re remote, Carly?
A: I’m not
but I can share. Go. Not all the time, but go be with the people once in a while. Otherwise, find ways to socialize. You have to connect with people, and meetings and working chats don’t do that.Q: How can I successfully become a staff engineer working remotely?
A: You are going to have to work even harder for you and your work to be visible. Present a lot. Run book clubs or other reoccurring, real-time initiatives across your org. Lead initiatives that improve on-call, or velocity. When you show up in person, spend the time in 1:1s with people to reinforce what you’re doing. Make sure your director or above knows what you’re working on they care about.
Q: I see a lot of shaking heads about remote difficulty. My company is literally on the other side of the country, should I just try investing in somewhere local?
A: See above. Not impossible, but hard. If there’s similar size and scope at local places it may be easier, but you also have to deal with ramping up and being new.
Q: What books did you read to improve your technical acumen? Any podcasts?
A:
Mythical Man Month, Fred Brooks
Radical Candor, Kim Scott
Effective Java, Josh Bloch
Java Concurrency in Practice, Brian Goetz
I listen to podcasts but none that make me a better engineer. We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle might help with empathy, but I wouldn’t recommend it to supercharge your career.
Q: Maybe a silly question. But what's scope, is it like the size of something you’re building?
A: For the purposes of this conversation, we mean the impact what you build has (orders of magnitude of users, etc), and the organization level (team, senior manager org, director org, vp org) you assert influence over.
Q: Would like to hear the group’s thoughts on the significance of “self reflection or awareness” when one gets passed over for a promotion? What questions have you asked yourself during those moments?
A: The question, really, is why not this time, what can I do differently to fill these gaps. It could be true that someone else’s actions negatively impacted your work, but your reflection should be about how to insulate from those impacts or mitigate them. Show responsibility and ownership.
Q: How does being known” apply when you’re applying for a Staff position at a new company?
A: It doesn’t. Well… it can help if you have past connections to write recommendations, but they aren’t going to gauge how big your social web is at your current company to decide if you can handle it. There may be behavioral questions that can be used to determine how you get help and get unblocked, which can be a proxy.
Q: What do we need to do to get to our technical skills to clear the hurdle to advance to staff?
A: Design things, stick around to ensure they can evolve. “Normal” things are necessary but not level-setting like code quality.
Q: Has anyone here been fired or laid off. Any advice on how to deal with reorgs?
A: Not fired, not laid off, reorged a ton. You deal with it by learning what is important, any differences in process, and what is measured, then adapting.
Q: Which comm skill( Speaking vs Writing ) matter for a senior engineer who is strongly technical?
A: Both. You will likely write more things that are read more broadly than you’ll present real time, but you have to do both well to succeed.
Q: Devs vs designer vs PM who would win in a bar fight?
A: Dev will waste too much time over-designing their improvised weapon. Designer will redline a beautiful, effective weapon but won’t build it. PM will write a dry doc and send it to both of them. They will get drowsy, then he’ll smash a chair over each of their heads.
Q: There is a feeling of insecurity when we share our knowledge. How to overcome that?
A: You can’t be sure you know something until you have to teach it to others. If you’re worried about gaps in your knowledge, be willing to say “I don’t know, let me find out”. If you are saying things that may not be true, take the time to find out first. If you have social anxiety or other nervousness or anxiousness about public speaking, that is a whole other topic.
Q: How to overcome the fear of appearance for someone who is a strong and good engineer?
I don’t know if I understand that completely. I think this might be awkwardness, social anxiety, imposter syndrome, etc getting in the way of presenting yourself and your ideas to others with confidence. My general approach has been practicing presenting with a smaller group, or alone, recording, etc to work kinks out, and then… realizing that no one cares if you misspeak or get frazzled. You’re not going for a Tony, you’re sharing technical knowledge. People are far too worried about themselves to harp on some tiny nuance in your presentation that you beat yourself up over.
Q: What if your manager is trying to sabotage you. What if your manager doesn’t want you to advance even if you’re doing great work at your company. I’ve been in this situation before and I’ve been told it’s a common scenario.
A: It’s not a common scenario. There are bad bosses, but that range of bad rarely involved active sabotage of a report’s advancement. That’s somewhere between discrimination and harassment. If the behavior is accepted by the company, hence that person will not be made to leave, you need to. That’s very toxic. I know “just leave” is a privileged thing to say, it’s not easy to just find another job, but you will be miserable. If it’s a big enough company leave the team, and ensure that HR is aware before your manager so if they start retaliating when you state intention to leave, it’s clear that is the reason.
Q: What about if your manager changes?
A: Continuity in your work and progress is between you and your packet/doc/portfolio. Your manager can be a temporary steward, but you own it. If it takes you more time to ramp up on the new team, this could delay things slightly, but the data you have (including feedback you got at the time of the project, right?) is still completely relevant.
Q: Working for a startup vs Big company as a Senior -> Staff Engineer transition?
A: I’ve worked at smaller companies. One didn’t have any real leveling. Not like a meritocratic “member of the technical staff” thing, like… they didn’t know how to build a ladder to advance engineers. There was a chief architect, his job was already taken, then occasionally without any obvious indications of why, someone would be hired as “senior”. I don’t ever remember someone being promoted to senior, I don’t think that process existed. One person was promoted to team lead (and I wasn’t when we filled similar roles for different products, so I ran up and down the fire exit stairs and ranted and raved). The second place did have staff as a level. I was hired at the bottom of the ladder. I think staff was two notches up. I had no idea how to get there. What is most important, even if your company doesn’t have specific titles that map to big tech, is stepping into a role where you are directing projects and other engineers’ work, and planning “the big move” for your team well into the future. Even if a title doesn’t exist, behaviors are still relevant. If you can’t get the opportunities anywhere, startup or not, it may not be a place you can grow how you want and you may have to find one that will.
Q: For some companies, packet for Staff level goes all the way to VP level, how can one have a relationship several levels higher than their current level?
A: first: that seems to indicate mistrust of directors and senior managers. I get that a bad promotion could lead to expensive, poor decisions, but a VP filtering these seems egregious to me. Anyway! You get visibility with them by asking insightful questions in their all-hands, and by making friends with their EA so you can get them invited to your demos, and you can have a 1:1 every quarter or half. You may think they don’t want to talk to you or don’t have time, but an EA plied with doughnuts or other kindnesses can often find gaps, and they DO want to talk to you.
Q: If you're not valued for the work you do, what's the point of doing? Do you guys mean talk what you do? Consider an introvert Engineer? Coming out of that zone is tough, really tough and it isn't a thing that can be changed quickly? So unless someone has an exceptional manager, the Engineer is not going to be considered for a promotion?
A: Introversion means something particular, which is that you can recover energy being alone. Social anxiety, low confidence, and other things that affect relationship building at work are not immutable. Equating this to you “being an introvert” asserts it is innate, crippling, and permanent. Overcoming these things is similar to growing the scope of your work. Can you talk with one PM you don’t work with directly? Can you meet with a small cohort from another team to share your architectural design? Can you present to your team and adjacent teams about your recent project? Can you run a meeting that spans more teams in your org? It’s a muscle, you have to build it over time, with practice. If there’s actually a clinical reason for being less engaged, maybe therapy or drugs can help. I will also just say that it’s important to frame things such that you aren’t “cursed” or the victim. “I have a harder time speaking in front of unfamiliar people than others, so that will be a stretch for me. Maybe I can get advice at toastmasters or from my peers that are good at this” is acknowledging a challenge and facing it. Saying you won’t get promoted without an exceptional manager is ceding that control and ownership. I am awful at some things that I still have to do. It bums me out, and sometimes I do get stuck, but that’s a problem I have to solve.
Q: What advice would you give people that are newly switching careers? For example, I graduated with a nutrition degree and want to get my masters in computer engineering so that I can become somewhat of a AR/VE software developer.
A: AR or other niche technology can be an aspiration, but it is not the first lily pad you need to jump to. You need to develop broad, fungible development skills and understand general software practice and quality, work on it for a while, hone it, then look at specializing. Maybe you COULD get your first job in that area, but it may be hard to find that kind of job at all times, and if you pigeonhole your knowledge it can be hard to generalize later.
From there, you’re doing a brave thing. Get help along the way. Mock interview, put code on the internet for people to criticize, etc. Build the skills, be solving problems fluently.
Q: From someone looking to move from staff equivalent engineering in big finance to pure tech firms: What do you think is the biggest gap to bridge - culture / org / core engg skill / the decade or so shift in technology stack?
A: I assume in finance you’re an associate VP when you’re a senior engineer, and full VP when you’re staff.
I was wrong. This is Google and JP Morgan. High end of mid-level (L4) at google maps to VP at JPM. Staff at Google spans Executive Director to managing director.
The biggest gap will be around culture, in my mind. You’ll learn a new software stack. What you need to show you’re ready for is, as I understand (interviewed at Capital One and was en route to offer, but they bait/switched me) is that what is expected of engineering teams is a lot more… hm… higher levels of ownership, and more direct impact. My feeling is in finance, a lot of software is “enabling”, but may not be a revenue generating practice directly. At many big tech companies what you’re building is more immediately impacting users and revenues. At a FinTech company you may build consumer-facing software that does have a lot of user impact, but it is still often at a smaller scale.
Q: What teams are easier to achieve the promo to staff Engineer?
A: Ones that are visible to other staff+ engineers or whose work can be made visible. If no one sees it, it’s hard to use it for promo. That’s a little glib, but I think like… if you’re in a brand new discipline (ambient language acquisition engineer) it will be tough, because there may be very few folks higher in the ladder. Otherwise, being front end or backend should matter a lot less now than it did 10 years ago. You still need front end people (or, rarely, someone who actually deeply knows front end and backend) to be able to vouch for the complexity of your work. Otherwise… prod, infra, front end, back end… I don’t think it matters much.
Q: On that note can you elaborate what kind of an impact can a Principal Frontend Engineer have?
A: I don’t know the answer. Maybe
or others from the panel have worked with someone in this role. If I was guessing it would be evaluating all web and application development patterns and evaluating which are easiest to modify, being into compliance, fastest to develop features on, and see if those learnings can be applied to others, if some cases warrant cross-platform libraries versus bespoke native code, where the biggest risks are, and what other major players in the industry do to address this (and if they would work for their teams). Maybe it’s a simplification to use a new (but pluggable) design language without code changes, maybe it’s evaluating every network call for all clients, auditing, and finding savings across the board for payload or latency, or patterns of calls that could be collapsed to a single API to avoid serial round trips, or that the network abstraction in clients is poor and better client-side libraries should be built that will insulate engineers from specific network calls and traffic, to allow call-bundling, “best choice” API selection for given tasks, etc. Whatever it is, it will impact a LOT (100s to 1000s+) of engineers.Q: What’s the overall opinion on PhDs in tech?
A: Um… they are pretty cool, I guess? If you want to work in industry as a software engineer, versus say… an applied scientist, or researcher… I don’t know how a PhD helps. There is published research in industry, I’m sure occasionally a coauthor is an engineer… but what you get from a PhD doesn’t feel like it maps to what is demanded to advance as an engineer. I’d spend the time working (or studying on your own if you intended to get your PhD while working), but being able to call yourself doctor seems cool.
Q: As engineers who have successfully reached staff positions, do you have any actionable advice or specific mentorship recommendations for women who are aspiring to grow in this role?
A:
has first hand experience. I would have… maybe less useful input. Hopefully this isn’t the case most places, but I honestly think specific to being a woman you may have to soften things to protect mens’ delicate egos. I had to learn this because I would just say true things and didn’t realize people need to be able to hear and absorb them, just being right isn’t enough. Taking direction/feedback/criticism from a woman can be threatening to insecure men. There’s also classic double standards of “assertiveness/bitchiness” and such. Mostly, find teams with women that tell you it is a good place for women to work. You don’t have to work directly for women, but see if there are any in leadership roles and more senior engineering roles. If you aren’t seeing it, you could be the first, but it’s clear data on the difficulty.Q: For someone who is graduating with no connection in the industry, how do you get your foot in the door when your resume gets declined automatically by ATS?
A: I don’t really know if the ATS is real. I’m sure somewhere it is. You network, then get introduced to people at your target company, though. That’s the only trick.
Q: What are some interesting tech careers paths after staff Engineer in big tech?
A:
If your company has a career-long tech ladder, you can keep climbing. The work gets… strange, in my opinion. There’s a lot of directing huge efforts across multiple orgs. Maybe there’s coding?
Move to people management exclusively or as a hybrid (TLM) role. This is popular at this level. It is not a given you will like it or be good at it, so it’s not a “default”, though many great it that way.
I don’t see a lot of TPM transitions, but it seems interesting and skills would transfer well.
Some places PMs are much more technical, and it may be a welcome change for you, and you’ll know better what engineers want and need from you.
MMA. Study BJJ with a Gracie and really mix things up in the octagon.
Q: what are your inspirations to keep a technical career?
A: I don’t know, now. I wanted to build a CPU architecture translation layer to make software compiled for one CPU runnable on another. Then QuickTransit’s tech got licensed by Apple as Rosetta and the wind was out of my sails. I want to feel important and don’t presently. I think I am very good at some parts of my job, so hopefully I can do those things more? I like software, I don’t know what else I would do.
Q: I know I am putting in tech efforts but it’s about creating the right impact with the right rubrics (of specific company) eventually. Correct?
A: Rubric may be strong, but it’s also probably pretty accurate. If you’re doing good work but it has no impact, it was likely the wrong work. If it has impact but you don’t know how to enunciate that, get help.
Q: Does anyone on the panel have a quick guide/templates you share on how to track your impact during perf season?
A: I don’t.
Data things I didn’t answer.
Q: Please, What steps are being taken to ensure the data engineering team is aligned with the broader data strategy of the company?
I don’t know. Let’s see if our data friends can help.
Q: I have this question to Zach, How do you think as a Data Engineer you can move ahead in the ladder as you did?
A: We will try to get
to answer here or elsewhere.Q: How to stay update on what's going on on the modern data engineering market like how you can for example make your pipelines updated in parallel of the innovation that's happening in many decades?
A: I am not a data magician.
or may be able to help. Keeping up in general is reading a lot, and checking what the state of the art is regularly.