[Book Reviews] Staff Engineer — Leadership beyond the management track
Hello everyone, and thank you for continuing to join me on my enriching journey of exploring various thought-provoking books. In my latest quest for knowledge and personal growth, I’ve delved into the realm of “Staff Engineer — Leadership beyond the management track”
As a mid-level engineer, my passion for my profession is not just about coding or solving intricate software problems. it also extends to a keen interest in understanding the complexities of leadership in the tech world. This book served as an enlightening guide, offering me fascinating insights into the various roles and responsibilities that come with being a staff engineer, and more importantly, the potential paths to leadership that are not strictly bound to traditional management roles.
Join me as I dive deeper into the essential points I gleaned from this compelling read and share my understanding of what it means to be a staff engineer. As we traverse this knowledge path together, I hope my reflections can help you gain a richer perspective on the leadership potential that lies beyond the conventional management track in tech.
Staff Engineer
The book has separated to big 2 parts
- Definition of staff engineers — The relate informations about Staff level
- Stories of staff-plus engineer — The quality stories of experiences who has became staff-plus level
My Summary of the book
Part 1 — Definition of staff engineers
The first part of the book are related to the information of Staff-plus level for engineering in tech. Including overview of the positions, What kind of routine for staff level, How to operate in the level and the expectation of the level. Honestly, in my opinion, certain sections of this part seemed unnecessarily long and sometimes diverted from the main topics. (It’s just my feeling though 🥹) Since the book itself has many pages to deal with and some context are still vague for me so that’s why I honestly said to everyone. But the informations for this part will much more sense when read the example stores.
Below is my summarize the key skills and informations for someone want to get it really quick.
Quick summarize
The four archetypes of Staff-plus roles:
- Tech Lead
- Architect
- Solver
- Right Hand
And it’s also divide to below type as well
- Depth (Specialist)
- Breadth (Generalist)
Tech Lead
This is the person responsible for guiding the approach and execution of a specific team or group of teams. They partner closely with one or more managers within a particular area. Tech Leads coordinate their teams towards solving complex tasks and unblocking them along the way, often maintaining the necessary cross-team and cross-functional relationships for the team’s success. They are a close partner to the team’s product manager and the first person called when the roadmap needs to be shuffled. While they are coding less, they are still the person defining their team’s technical vision.
- Depth (Specialist): They may be an expert in a specific technology or component of the system, like database optimization or microservice architecture. Their expertise allows them to guide the team on these intricate technical areas.
- Breadth (Generalist): They have a broad understanding of various technologies and system components. They excel in coordinating different parts of a project and can make high-level architectural decisions based on a holistic view of the system.
Architect
Architects are responsible for the direction, quality, and approach within a critical area. They use their in-depth knowledge of technical constraints, user needs, and organizational level leadership to ensure the success of a specific technical domain within their company. They maintain an intimate understanding of the business’ needs, their users’ goals, and the relevant technical constraints.
- Depth (Specialist): They may specialize in a specific domain, such as cloud infrastructure or frontend development. Their role is to ensure that the company’s approach within this domain aligns with the business goals and user needs.
- Breadth (Generalist): They have a broad understanding of the business’ needs, user goals, and various technical domains within the company. They can adapt and apply effective strategies across different technical domains.
Solver
The Solver digs deep into complex problems and finds an appropriate path forward. They are a trusted agent of the organization who works on critical problems identified by organizational leadership. While they may do relatively little organizational wrangling, Solvers often stop working on problems once they’re contained, which requires a careful balance to avoid leaving teams with unresolved issues.
- Depth (Specialist): They may specialize in debugging complex software issues, resolving security vulnerabilities, or improving system performance. They are expected to dig deep into these issues until they find a suitable solution.
- Breadth (Generalist): They are flexible and can work on a wide range of technical problems as directed by the organization’s leadership. They switch between different domains and problems based on the organization’s priorities.
Right Hand
The Right Hand role extends an executive’s attention, borrowing their scope and authority to operate particularly complex organizations. They provide additional leadership bandwidth to leaders of large-scale organizations, working to scale the leader’s impact by removing important problems from their plate. These roles involve the intersection of business, technology, people, culture, and process.
- Depth (Specialist): They may specialize in a particular area of leadership, such as strategic planning, process optimization, or crisis management. Their role is to extend the executive’s capacity in these areas.
- Breadth (Generalist): They handle a variety of issues spanning across business, technology, people, culture, and process. They can jump into different problems and act on behalf of the executive.
Yep, I hope you guy will get what I meant here. 🙇♂️
Part 2 — Stories of staff-plus engineer
Here they come! The best parts of the book, Example stories of Staff-plus level.
I found several insights in the book that I can adapt to my work routine, particularly those related to time management and achieving project goals.
For examples
- It’s totally okay to divide the work spread the whole week with swap pattern. Example in this format Mon/Tue/Wed/Thu/Fri can use Meeting/Coding/Meeting/Coding/Meeting or Coding/Meeting/ Coding/Meeting/Coding depends on the week of work.
- You don’t need to have Staff level projects to become Staff-plus. Let’s think in collaboration across team and increasing to organization level and the impact you can made for them. You will become quality staff engineer soon.
The additional interesting resources for you, All of them is really give me the useful informations for my future career. 🙇♂️
Appendix
That’s really useful book for everyone to learn about the informations for the higher level of career path in tech particularly someone like me who work as software engineer. I can able to reflect myself who I will going to be in career. After reading this book, I am inclined towards the ‘Depth’ archetype because of my interest in specializing in certain technologies. However, I am also attracted to the ‘Breadth’ archetype due to the wide range of skills it encompasses. It will be interesting to see how my career evolves over time. But I would say I love in the Architect archetype though. ✌️
I would say I give it 4.3 out of 5. Maybe it’s because I still have many things to learn so some of the context I couldn’t realize until I read the example stories which give me much more sense to the first part. Anyway, Please let me give to 4.3 even the example stories I want to give exceed than max rating scores. 🙇♂️
Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. — Seneca
That’s it, I hope you enjoy it so far. See you in the following review book blogs. Furthermore, You can reach me at the below links. I would love to hear your thoughts on this book if you’ve read it. Or if you have suggestions for other books that can help in my journey as a software engineer, please let me know!
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