AI-enabled developer productivity, build systems, and engineering leadership
Posted on in Technology Management / Leadership
A practical way for senior engineers to grow organizational scope by creating durable leverage instead of becoming the default owner of every hard problem.
Posted on in Technology Management / Leadership
A practical coaching system for engineering managers who want senior ICs to grow their scope and influence without treating people management as the default next step.
Posted on in Technology Management / Leadership
The difference between staff engineer impact and senior engineer output is not that staff engineers stop writing code.
The difference is that output describes what you personally produced, while impact describes the useful change that persists because you were involved.
Senior engineers need both. They are expected to ship difficult …
Posted on in Technology Management / Leadership
Many excellent senior engineers stall before staff engineer for a simple reason: they keep optimizing for the job that made them successful.
That is not a character flaw. Senior engineers are usually promoted because they can take hard work, make it concrete, and get it across the finish line. They …
Posted on in Technology Management / Leadership
The move from senior engineer to staff engineer is not just a promotion with a bigger title and more meetings.
It is a change in the operating model.
Senior engineers are usually rewarded for strong execution inside a meaningful scope. They can take ambiguous work, turn it into a plan …
Posted on in Review
The Staff Engineer's Path by Tanya Reilly is a career book for engineers who have discovered that senior technical work does not automatically become clearer when the title gets bigger.
That is the quiet problem with the staff engineer track. Earlier engineering levels usually have a visible center of gravity …
