How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer

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• Hacker News
• It's interesting how engineer/developer levels are so meaningless across organizations. Where I am, somebody who can only do the work assigned to them isn't senior. That's borderline entry level. Doesn't mean they're a bad programmer or only have 3 hours of experience, just isn't at the higher level. Seems where this person works (Google?) that threshold is at staff
  by Neywiny
• I wish our most senior staff eng/architects actually worked on stuff that is useful. They love playing around with new technology that has nothing to do with our current platform or where we're going. Sometimes they'll try to fix some thing the last architect started on before they too move on to another job.
  by rr808
• I worked at the Staff level for a while, I think the key is to report to a director who manages managers. Every time I did I had a good time, projects were easy to define and people were easy to convince. I had the same level with a few managers who were managing other ICs, and that never worked. Other ICs try to compete on tasks, people don't come to you with their needs, you learn about different projects often too late, other teams are territorial and don't really want you to intervene.
  by napo
• The part I find challenging in the senior-staff twilight is that having deep technical knowledge means I can solve short term problems, just as requests, fast and effectively. The author mentions that you should spend time understanding the frustrations from other teams, but that takes up loads of time and I don’t like being the person who talks and talks but doesn’t push code and ship features. I’d love to hear how others have experienced that
  by intoXbox
• I think almost all of tech is bloated and massive layoffs wouldn’t phase most companies (though it would be harmful to people’s lives so it seems cruel to do this). Fewer people per teams means less context switching and devs own more. They don’t have to look for work, it will be in front of their face. In so many of these big tech companies I’ve worked at I’ve seen too many not having enough work to do. They end up creating meetings and other wasteful things (doc writing) to occupy their time. Managers and directors seem to want big bloated teams, the larger their head count the more they can demand and push for a promo.
  by ronnier
• This is all very good advice, but I would caution anyone asking the question at the start of the essay that they probably shouldn't be a Staff Eng. Unless you're at a company where that title is simply a rung on the ladder that doesn't have differentiated responsibilities (there are lots of those out there).

  Every person I've worked with who's been successful as a Staff+ Engineer, promoting them was normally more of a formality since they were already clearly doing the work. Every person I've seen 'rise to their level of incompetence' was striving to get the title/pay bump and looking to 'play the game' to get there.

  If your motivation for solving people's problems is that it will get you a promotion, instead of the fact that you like solving problems, then it's probably not the right job for you.

  by CSMastermind
• Funny people should have that problem. I have spent most of my career in the startup space, and my experience has consistently been that the amount of problems to solve is vastly larger than what I can reasonably achieve in my waking hours.

  So I don't find problems to solve, I try to assess which problems are most urgent, or which solution solves several of them at once. Learning to get that kind of prioritisation right to keep all teams and customers happy and productive is what I'm very proud of in my career.

  by 9dev
• The author notes:

  > One caveat: my experience comes mainly from working on infrastructure and developer tools at large companies, on teams where engineers have a lot of bottom-up autonomy to influence their roadmaps. In a more top-down environment, there may simply be less room to work this way.

  I wonder if the overall trend in tech is that engineers are experiencing less bottom-up autonomy and more top-down controlled environments. I would be curious to see how many tech companies (or the average engineer's experience) have changed from being tech led where engineers have autonomy to being more product management led. My suspicion without evidence is that the overall engineering autonomy has decreased over the years as the culture of tech has (in my opinion) shifted away from tech focus to more business, management, product focus with engineers just as the widgets who are tasked with fulfilling the goals of business, management, product.

  all hypothesis, only anecdata

  by wpasc