Preface
When folks ask about writing my first book, An Elegant Puzzle, I say that I wrote half of it over ten years and the other half in six months. Its creation was a challenge at times, and there are many things I’d love to change in the final product, but creating it was a personal highlight. As an author, you’re supposed to warn prospective authors away from writing a book, but I have no such warning, even to myself: I wanted to write another book.
The question was, what book? I might have more to say about engi‐ neering management at some point, but I certainly don’t have much more to say there now. I’ve spent more time as a manager than as a developer, and there are other folks far better situated to write about effective development. I hope to write a book about infrastructure en‐ gineering one day, but I’m trying to spend less time thinking about in‐ frastructure for the next few years.
Eventually, I came back to two core questions. What’s an area that chal‐ lenges me today? What’s a topic where I believe a book could nudge the technology industry in a positive direction? The issue that fit both bills was the role of the Staff Engineer. In most professions, folks be‐ come increasingly sure of their role as they become more senior, but it’s been my experience that many engineers lose their sense of direc‐ tion after reaching their first Staff, equivalent, or more senior role. It’s horrifying to watch folks pursue a Staff Engineer role for a decade or more, and then find that they despise the work or feel unequipped to succeed.
More than personally digging into the topic of finding and operating in these sort of Staff and post‐Staff–which I call Staff‐plus in this book– roles, I also recognized that different folks have a very different ex‐ perience of reaching these roles. Some of the most talented folks I’ve worked with struggled to pass the Senior Engineer level, encountering systematic barriers that continually push their promotion one cycle further out.
My first step was to outline the chapters and topics I wanted to write about, and what followed was a series of interviews where I was able to learn from the remarkable stories of folks reaching their first Staff Engineer role, and then also operating within those roles on the other side. These stories combined with my experience promoting and sup‐ porting Staff Engineers as a manager, and slowly built into this book.
Technology is a young industry, “the way things work” is far from de‐ cided, and it’s in all of our hands to push towards an equitable and effective vision of technical leadership. If you have a clear view of what a Staff Engineer has to be, I hope this book pushes you to chal‐ lenge your beliefs a bit, even if you don’t change your mind afterward. If you’re still building your view of what a Staff Engineer ought to be, then I hope this book helps you refine that picture a bit.