Notes from the book Staff Engineer by Will Larson
- Overview
- Operating at Staff
- Work on what matters
- Write an engineering strategy
- Curate technical quality
- Stay aligned with authority
- To lead, you have to follow
- Learn to never be wrong
- Create space for others
- Build a network of peers
- Getting the title where you are
- Deciding to switch companies
- Stories
Overview
Archetypes of staff engineers
- Tech lead, partners closely with a PM or EM to coordinate work on the team. Works with other teams
- Architect, responsible for success of specific technical domain, e.g. a public API, the frontend stack, storage strategy, cloud infrastructure
- Solver, handles deep technical problems
- Right hand, partners closely with leadership, helps scale a leader’s impact
Operating at Staff
Work on what matters
- Avoid snacking. It’s tempting to get distracted by low impact work. This work might be a good development opportunity for others.
- Avoid preening. A subcategory of snacking that is high visibility work that’s low impact.
- Work where there’s room and attention. Things that will become critical in the future.
- Help develop the team around you (onboarding, hiring)
- Finish things. Close out and ship projects.
Write an engineering strategy
- Good engineering strategies are often boring
- Strategies are tools for alignment that allow a team to make decisions efficiently
- Synthesize multiple (5) RFCs into a strategy
- Extrapolate multiple (5) strategies into a vision
- Visions are two to three years out
- A great vision should feel obvious