Название: The Staff Engineer’s Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change (Final)
Автор: Tanya Reilly
Издательство: O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Год: 2022
Страниц: 340
Язык: английский
Формат: epub
Размер: 10.2 MB

For years, companies have rewarded their most effective engineers with management positions. But treating management as the default path for an engineer with leadership ability doesn't serve the industry well--or the engineer. The staff engineer's path allows engineers to contribute at a high level, driving big projects, determining technical strategy, and raising everyone's skills.

This in-depth book shows you how to understand your role, manage your time, master strategic thinking, and set the standard for technical work. You'll read about how to be a leader without direct authority, how to plan ahead to make the right technical decisions, and how to make everyone around you better, while still growing as an expert in your domain.

I’ll unpack the staff engineer role by looking at what I think of as its three pillars: big-picture thinking, execution of projects, and leveling up the engineers you work with.

1. Big-picture thinking
Big-picture thinking means being able to step back and take a broader view. It means seeing beyond the immediate details and understanding the context that you’re working in. It also means thinking beyond the current time, whether that means initiating yearlong projects, building software that will be easy to decommission, or predicting what your company will need in three years.5

2. Execution
At the staff level, the projects you take on will become messier and more ambiguous. They’ll involve more people and need more political capital, influence, or culture change to succeed.

3. Leveling up
Every increase in seniority comes with more responsibility for raising the standards and skills of the engineers within your orbit, whether that’s your local team, colleagues in your organization, or engineers across your whole company or industry. This responsibility will include intentional influence through teaching and mentoring, as well as the accidental influence that comes from being a role model.

You’ll notice that these pillars sit on a solid foundation of technical knowledge and experience. This foundation is critical. Your big-picture perspective includes understanding what’s possible and having good judgment. When executing on projects, your solutions will need to actually solve the problems they set out to solve. When acting as a role model, your review comments should make code and designs better, and your opinions need to be well thought out—you need to be right! Technical skills are the foundation of every staff engineer role, and you’ll keep exercising them. But technical knowledge is not enough.

While software engineers don’t currently have this kind of professional responsibility, as technical leaders, we must be prepared to make the final call and own the outcome. In particular, when a decision is needed, avoid staying on the fence: weigh the options, choose decisively, and explain your reasoning. Be honest with yourself as you consider the trade-offs: you should be able to vote against your own preferences when you know it’s the best move.