Career

The RFC process is well-understood at most engineering organizations. You have a problem, you have a proposed solution, you write it up, you get feedback, and you either proceed or revise. RFCs are structured around a decision: should we do X, and if so, how? Strategy documents are different — and the difference matters. A strategy document is not asking “should we do X.” It is answering the question “why are we doing what we’re doing, and how does it connect to everything else we care about?” It is less about proposing a specific solution and more about establishing a shared understanding of the problem space, the constraints, and the reasoning that should govern future decisions in a domain. ...

Most performance review advice is written for engineers who are trying to get to senior. Pass code reviews. Ship features. Demonstrate ownership. Get visible. That playbook breaks at the staff level — and breaks in a particular way. Not because the work is harder, but because the feedback loop disappears. Your manager is often not technical enough to evaluate your architectural decisions in detail. Your impact is measured in quarters and years, not sprints. The “did I do well this week” signal that used to arrive through PR comments and 1:1s no longer exists. You are flying on instruments. ...

Every company has two org charts. The official one lives in an HR system somewhere. It shows boxes, lines, and reporting relationships. It is neat, hierarchical, and largely fictional as a map of how decisions actually get made. The second one exists nowhere in writing. It lives in people’s heads — in the instincts of engineers who have been around long enough to know who you really need to talk to before a proposal goes anywhere. This is the shadow org chart, and understanding it is one of the more underrated career skills an engineer can develop. ...

There is a standard toolkit for engineers. Version control. An IDE. A task tracker. Maybe a note-taking app. These tools exist because they solve problems that are consistent across roles: write code, track work, record things. The senior+ engineer job has a different set of problems. And the standard toolkit doesn’t solve them. The senior+ job is mostly not about writing code This is the uncomfortable truth that Tanya Reilly’s The Staff Engineer’s Path articulates clearly: senior+ engineering is a fundamentally different discipline from senior engineering. The technical work doesn’t go away — but it becomes one input into a much larger job that’s about strategy, alignment, influence, and organizational navigation. ...