A great post from blind
3 yoe Staff is not really a staff engineer. They are just a new breed of engineers who are empowered mostly by their title than their experience.
They are most likely an exceptional coder/hacker who can wrap up something over a weekend that the other engineer on your team would take a month to finish. They can probably rally a team together to deliver a high impact project in a super short amount of time and get you the business value you are looking for. They can even persuade other teams to align with their vision and get them to execute within the planned timelines.
What they can’t do but a real staff engineer can do are a long list of things that companies unfortunately don’t value all that much simply because of one reason - they take time and don’t help your bottom line immediately:
- Builds timeless systems that outlast anything that a weekend hacker can ever imagine. For decades.
- Comes up with original vision and ideas that spark real innovation and make way to *create* multiple teams and businesses even.
- Stops you from making very painful mistakes that will set you off into a pattern of “If this doesn’t scale, I’ll just tear it down and build from scratch” churn.
- Questions every single one of your dirty hacks but meets you in the middle to allow you deliver instead of hi-five-ing you for all the hacks you come up with as they are “solving” the problem.
- Never pay lip service and genuinely raise the bar on quality by not just asking tough questions and gloating but offering to help come up with sustainable/extendable processes.
- Listens to you in silence, expects to learn from you and be genuinely surprised by you and appreciate you if you come up with something novel regardless of your level. Instead of attempting to make it look like they inspired your ideas. They are simply tired of being full of themselves, been there done that.
I can go on but if you didn’t get the idea by now, you have a lot to learn my sweet summer “staff” engineer.