Staff-Engineer

Giving feedback is one of the most high-leverage things a senior engineer does — and one of the most consistently underdeveloped skills in the profession. Most engineers who are technically excellent struggle with feedback because the skills are completely different. Writing good code requires precision and correctness. Giving feedback that changes behavior requires understanding why the behavior exists and what conditions would change it. This post is about technical feedback specifically: code reviews, design critiques, architecture discussions, and the kind of direct feedback about someone’s technical work that either helps them grow or falls flat. ...

Most engineers write their first RFC by borrowing a template and filling in the blanks. The result is a document that describes a technical solution in detail, lists some alternatives, and ends with an open-ended question about what people think. That kind of RFC doesn’t produce decisions. It produces comment threads. An effective RFC is not a document that describes a solution. It is a document that frames a decision — that lays out the problem, the constraints, the viable options, and the trade-offs clearly enough that reviewers can evaluate them and reach a conclusion. The solution you prefer is in there, but it’s one item in a structured argument, not the whole document. ...

Most engineers have a vague sense of where they are in their career — roughly what level they’re operating at, roughly what the gaps are, roughly what they’re working toward. But “roughly” is usually not enough when the questions that matter get asked: in a performance review, in a promotion conversation, in a job search. Career tracking is the habit of converting that vague sense into something specific and current. It doesn’t require a lot of time — 10-15 minutes a week, done consistently, produces a picture that is dramatically more actionable than the one you’d reconstruct from memory at review time. ...

Most engineers have extensive experience being on the receiving end of 1:1s. As a junior or mid-level engineer, you have them with your manager. They set the agenda. You update on your work, raise blockers, ask questions. At the staff level, a significant number of your 1:1s are ones you initiate — with peers you need to work with, with stakeholders whose teams are upstream or downstream of yours, with leadership whose support you need for technical direction you’re trying to establish. These are different from the 1:1s you were trained on. The dynamics are different, the stakes are different, and the mistakes are different. ...

The staff engineer level is one of the most misunderstood in software engineering. Engineers trying to get there often frame it as “more senior” — more experience, better code, harder problems. That framing produces confusion and frustration, because the staff transition isn’t primarily about doing more of what made you senior. It requires a different way of thinking about what your job is. This isn’t a semantic distinction. It matters because the skills you need to develop, the evidence you need to build, and the way you should spend your time are genuinely different at the two levels. Optimizing the wrong things — spending years getting better at code quality when the lever you actually need is organizational influence — produces a plateau that is difficult to diagnose. ...

Reorgs are one of the most reliably destabilizing events in an engineer’s career — not because they are usually catastrophic, but because the uncertainty they create is difficult to think clearly through. You don’t know who your manager will be. You don’t know whether your team will stay together. You don’t know whether the project you’ve been leading for six months still matters. Most engineers respond to that uncertainty by waiting for clarity. The engineers who come out of reorgs in better shape are the ones who move toward clarity rather than waiting for it to arrive. ...

The standard advice for senior engineers is “be more strategic.” Nobody provides tooling for what that actually means in practice. Most productivity and knowledge management tools are built for managers or PMs. The senior IC workflow — navigating informal power structures, tracking skill bets across years, building visibility without a title change — doesn’t fit any standard category. Notion, Confluence, JIRA: these are collaboration tools optimized for teams, not personal career intelligence. ...

A few years ago I was a senior engineer who was doing the job pretty well by the metrics that were visible. Shipping features, writing design docs, unblocking teammates. All the output was there. What I was bad at — and only slowly becoming aware of — was the other 40% of the senior job. The part that doesn’t show up in a performance review as a discrete line item but that determines whether your actual impact is 1x or 3x. The org navigation. The influence. Knowing which conversations needed to happen before a proposal could move. Understanding why some technically good ideas got killed and others with obvious flaws survived. ...

There is a common failure mode for engineers who are doing promotion-worthy work but not getting promoted: they believe the work speaks for itself. It doesn’t. The work gets you to the starting line. The promotion case is a separate thing — a curated, evidence-backed narrative about impact, scope, and judgment that your manager and a promo committee can evaluate without direct exposure to your day-to-day. Building that case is a skill, and most engineers have never been taught it. ...

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. ...