# Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track - Will Larson
Synced: [[2023_11_30]] 6:03 AM
Last Highlighted: [[2023_09_05]]
Tags: [[business]] [[Business]] [[career growth]] [[Career Growth]] [[startup]] [[Startup]]
## Highlights
[[2023_08_31]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h95f23wpzczx08arymhehpa7)
> Tech Leads are the most common Staff archetype and lead one team or a cluster of teams in their approach and execution. They’re comfortable scoping complex tasks, coordinating their team towards solving them, and unblocking them along the way. Tech Leads often carry the team’s context and maintain many of the essential cross-team and cross-functional relationships necessary for the team’s success. They’re a close partner to the team’s product manager and the first person called when the roadmap needs to be shuffled.
[[2023_08_31]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h95fp81sj6nrwfc8f9w68zgg)
> The Architect title has fallen out of style in many companies, but the Architect role remains alive and well for folks operating at Staff-plus levels. Architects are responsible for the success of a specific technical domain within their company, for example, the company’s API design, frontend stack, storage strategy, or cloud infrastructure. For a domain to merit an Architect, it must be both complex and enduringly central to the company’s success.
[[2023_08_31]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h95fr03fq8cw7cr3v6sy4skh)
> The Solver is a trusted agent of the organization who goes deep into knotty problems, continuing to work on them until they’re resolved. Folks in this role are moved onto problems identified by organizational leadership as critical and either lacking a clear approach or with a high degree of execution risk.
[[2023_08_31]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h95fw1pnpyfx6nfmvwfzbdqa)
> As you think about which of these archetypes would fit you, start by reflecting on the kinds of work that energize you, and then consider which roles are available within your company.
> All companies develop a need for engineers who can fill the Tech Lead role, which makes it the most accessible archetype to attain your first Staff engineering role. Companies that emphasize individual ownership rather than team ownership often develop the Solver early. On the other hand, companies that operate under strict sprints or agile methodologies tend to develop that role late, if ever. In the recent crops of fast-growing technology companies, the Architect and Right Hand roles have generally emerged as the organizations reached one hundred and one thousand engineers, respectively, and simply don’t exist beforehand. Companies with other strains of cultural DNA often develop them earlier, or sometimes never.
[[2023_08_31]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h95w59172eek2y21p81eevrf)
> Success in these roles requires remaining engaged; it’s essential to understand what kinds of work energize you. The Tech Lead and Architect tend to work with the same people on the same problems for years, developing a tight sense of team and shared purpose. Some months their focus will be a top company priority, and sometimes they’ll be humming along so well that executives forget their team exists.
> The Solver and Right Hand bounce from fire to fire, often having more transactional interactions with the folks they’re working with on any given week. They’re tightly aligned with executive priorities and are likely to receive recognition for addressing leadership’s most pressing problems. On the other hand, while they’ll nominally be on a team with other folks, there will generally be little-to-no overlap within their team’s areas of focus, and they’ll often have a limited sense of community.
[[2023_08_31]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h95w9g2bpr62mr27tvsxxs0j)
> Their daily schedule varies a bit [by archetype](#None), but there’s a shared foundation across all archetypes: setting and editing technical direction, providing sponsorship and mentorship, injecting engineering context into organizational decisions, exploration, and what [Tanya Reilly](https://noidea.dog) calls [being glue](https://noidea.dog/glue).
[[2023_09_01]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h97de523h2bgsx0s2yeg9cd9)
> [Hill-climbing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_climbing) is a simple optimization algorithm. Imagine you’re standing on a mountain somewhere and want to get to the top. You turn around in a circle, identify the highest nearby point, and then walk there. Once you get there, you turn around in a circle again, find the highest nearby point from your new location, and go there. If you keep doing this, you’ll get to the top of whatever mountain you’re on. However, imagine you tried this on a foggy day. Because you can’t see very far, you might get to the highest nearby point and later realize there was a much higher point just out of sight.
> Hill-climbing can’t solve every problem, but it’s so effective that many companies struggle to take other approaches. This can be a consumer-oriented company struggling to support enterprise deals or a mature company struggling to compete with a smaller competitor’s release cadence. It can even be the case that your current business is so valuable that [it’s hard to prioritize new businesses](https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma), even though the valuable business’ growth rate is trailing downwards.
[[2023_09_01]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h97des2ke13ha3zj1c2rgamc)
> Being Glue
> [Tanya Reilly](https://noidea.dog) wrote a wonderful post, [Being Glue](https://noidea.dog/glue), which captures another core element of successful Staff engineers: doing the needed, but often invisible, tasks to keep the team moving forward and shipping its work. It’s not glamorous, but high impact organizations often have one or more Staff engineer working behind the scenes expediting the [most important work and ensuring it gets finished](private://read/01h93ysz92ypyxk41fykmv43m3#None).
[[Being Glue]]
[[2023_09_05]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h9j7hn81wyncva9r4arwmmba)
> [Work on what matters](private://read/01h93ysz92ypyxk41fykmv43m3#None) to make the most of the working hours you have, particularly as you get further along in your career and life’s commitments expand
[[2023_09_05]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h9j7j67zan26nxz8d7haz3tz)
> [Write an engineering strategy](private://read/01h93ysz92ypyxk41fykmv43m3#None) to guide your organization’s approach to supporting your company’s business objectives with its architecture, technology selection, and organizational structure
[[2023_09_05]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h9j7jcprph22gx91qg562s40)
> [Curate technical quality](private://read/01h93ysz92ypyxk41fykmv43m3#None) to maintain the quality of your company’s architecture and software as it grows and tacks over time
[[2023_09_05]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h9j7jt6kmse6zs22k172n9ds)
> [Stay aligned with authority](private://read/01h93ysz92ypyxk41fykmv43m3#None) to remain an effective leader over time. Technical leadership roles rely on proxied authority from another (usually, managerial) leader, and continued access to that authority depends on staying aligned, trustworthy, and predictable
[[2023_09_05]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h9j7k572g22b3e0js2k7epdd)
> [To lead, you have to follow](private://read/01h93ysz92ypyxk41fykmv43m3#None). Having a vivid sense of how things ought to work is a powerful leadership tool, but it’s also essential to learn to blend your vision with the visions from your peers and leadership
[[2023_09_05]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h9j7kp1fnnhp31h4cs3r6ccm)
> [Learn to never be wrong](private://read/01h93ysz92ypyxk41fykmv43m3#None) shift away from being right and towards understanding and communication. Stop spending your social capital repairing relationships frayed by conflict, and learn to collaborate with folks with different priorities and perspectives. This also comes with the added benefit of fewer folks complaining about you to your manager
[[2023_09_05]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h9j7rjka2rr38strr1swpjar)
> Indeed, pacing yourself becomes the central challenge of a sustained, successful career: increasingly senior roles require that you accomplish more and more and do it in less and less time. The ledge between these two constraints gets narrower the further you go, but it remains walkable if you take a deliberate approach.
[[2023_09_05]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h9j7vp7dtx3t8hajfcxjqda6)
> When you’re busy, these snacks give a sense of accomplishment that makes them psychologically rewarding. Still, you’re unlikely to learn much from doing them, others are likely equally capable of completing them (and for some of them, it might be a good development opportunity), and there’s a tremendous opportunity cost versus doing something higher impact.
> It’s ok to spend some of your time on snacks to keep yourself motivated between bigger accomplishments, but you have to keep yourself honest about how much time you’re spending on high-impact work versus low-impact work. In senior roles, you’re more likely to self-determine your work, and if you’re not deliberately tracking your work, it’s easy to catch yourself doing little to no high-impact work.
[[2023_09_05]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h9j8cyyk8jt2hxr8bz23g6m2)
> Where “snacking” is the broad category of doing easy and low-impact work, there’s a particularly seductive subset of snacking that I call “preening.” Preening is doing low-impact, high-visibility work. Many companies conflate high-visibility and high-impact so strongly that they can’t distinguish between preening and impact, which is why it’s not uncommon to see some companies’ senior-most engineers spend the majority of their time doing work that’s of dubious value, but that is frequently recognized in company meetings
[[2023_09_05]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h9j8k30c02phwcx61t9q4se5)
> Many folks would assume that companies, rational optimizers that they are, avoid spending much time on low-impact high-effort projects. Unfortunately, that isn’t consistently the case. It’s surprisingly common for a new senior leader to join a company and immediately drive [a strategy shift that fundamentally misunderstands the challenges at hand](https://lethain.com/grand-migration/). The ghosts of their previous situation hold such a firm grasp on their understanding of the new company that they misjudge the familiar as the essential.
[[2023_09_05]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h9j8p3twhbhk42rbknecbr0j)
> Instead, the most effective places to work are those that matter to your company but still have enough room to actually do work. What are priorities that will become critical in the future, where you can do great work ahead of time? Where are areas that are doing ok but could be doing great with your support?
> Sometimes you’ll find work that’s worthy of attention but which an organization is incapable of paying attention to, usually because its leadership doesn’t value that work. In some companies, this is developer tooling work. In others, it’s inclusion work. In most companies, it’s [glue work](https://noidea.dog/glue)
[[2023_09_05]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h9j8tzn90pksn4pn4dhkx7jj)
> A surprising number of projects are one small change away from succeeding, one quick modification away from unlocking a new opportunity, or one conversation away from consensus. I think of making those small changes, quick modifications, and short conversations as editing your team’s approach.
> With your organizational privilege, relationships you’ve built across the company, and ability to see around corners derived from your experience, you can often shift a project’s outcomes by investing the smallest ounce of effort, and this is some of the most valuable work you can do.
> It’s particularly valuable because it’s quick, it’s easy, it’s highly motivating for both you and the person you help, and it’s hugely impactful when done well
[[2023_09_05]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h9j8tf1jfd76a59ngfjgevxy)
> One special sort of editing is helping finish a project that just can’t quite close itself out. Often you’ll have a talented engineer earlier in their career who is already doing the work but can’t quite create buy-in or figure out how to rescope their project into finishable work. It’s surprisingly common that coaching a teammate on how to tweak a project into something finishable and then lending them your privilege to budge the right friction points will transform a six-month slog into a two-week sprint with almost an identical impact.
[[2023_09_05]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h9j8vfy0mntfkr4qq6begkz9)
> Time spent getting work finished is always time well spent.
[[2023_09_05]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h9j8wvbsfteda51r34sb1hyf)
> The final category of work that matters is the sort that you’re uniquely capable of accomplishing. Sure there’s work that you’re faster at or better at than some other folks, but much more important is the sort of work that simply won’t happen if you don’t do it.
> This work is an intersection of what you’re exceptionally good at and what you genuinely care about