Lately, I have been fascinated with researching the behaviors of Staff Engineers. They focus on having the highest possible impact on the organization. Generally, this means enabling and leveling up others around them over just concentrating on their personal contributions. As a Senior engineer, I still do a lot of designing and implementing instead of being primarily others-focused. However, I still try to pick up these behaviors and use them on the side when fitting.
Resources
Books
- The Staff Engineer’s Path - Tanya Reilly
- Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track
- Will Larson
- (This is on my to-read list, just listening to the interviews podcast the book is based on now.)
Other books
- Designing Data Intensive Systems - Martin Kleppmann , a very good book and jumping-off place for further research. I should re-read it sometime and write a post.
- Team Topologies - Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, my notes blog post
- The Software Engineer’s Guidebook - Gergely Orosz, coming Fall 2023. This isn’t solely about Staff level, but the progression from fundamentals to Distinguished
Podcasts
- StaffEng - Will Larson, interviews backing the StaffEng book
- Big Ideas in App Architecture - the host David Joy is uplifting to listen to, such a genuinely positive/invested/empathetic/grateful person. Also great tech discussions!
- Software Engineering Daily - hit or miss, a lot of times it is heavy on the product push even if the engineering content is there
- The Changelog - laid-back, easy listening
Websites and Personal Blogs
- StaffEng - Will Larson
- The Pragmatic Engineer - Gergely Orosz
- Chamber of Tech Secrets - Brian Chambers
- Matt Rickard’s blog
Corporate Tech Blogs
(The ones I subscribe to on Feedly. I need more good ones, thinking of dropping the Product blogs.)
- Spotify Engineering
- CloudFlare blog
- Chick-fil-a Tech
- Netflix Tech Blog
- Product blogs: AWS and Hashicorp