How do you reach the Staff Engineer role?
Break through the ambiguity of senior+ promotions methodically
All promotions up until the senior level are quite straightforward - you are kind of doing the same thing you have been doing within the same context you have been doing them, but faster, with higher quality and expertise, and then you get promoted as those skills grow.
However, beyond the senior engineer, things get a bit more ambiguous. ToT digest included several articles in the past that clarify both senior+ promotions and staff roles. In the below article, you will get very specific advice on how to run that staff-level project that is often an implicit requirement for staff promotion.
To be 100% honest, I am not a big fan of “promotion projects”, but I am hoping this article will help you get closer to that staff role you are looking for.
Staff Projects: Pt 3. Breaking into Staff Engineering (13 min)
There are multiple ways to break out from a Senior Engineer to a Staff Engineer. One of them is indeed doing a “Staff Project”. This article dives deep into what constitutes a staff-level project or, more importantly, how you can validate that within your organization before doing anything. There can be a lot of vagueness on what staff role implies, and this article will help you on your journey of breaking through that fog of ambiguity.
Audience: Senior Software Engineers
Value: Learn how to drive “staff-level” projects
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐🌟
Failure is Necessary for Achievement and Growth — Why Success is Dangerous for Learning (4 min)
At one point in your life, you learn the value of failure. Effectively, you have to be open to being a noob at a certain thing if you want to learn anything remotely new. If you do not suck at something, it means you are probably not learning much. This newsletter is a good example. Before I started, I had no idea how to write a newsletter or what is the value of a good writing cadence. And I still suck at growing my audience or posting on LinkedIn (which is quite uncomfortable to me). But I still push through the unpleasantness of sucking at something to be able to learn new things. This article will tell you the dangers of staying in your “comfort zone”.
Audience: All professionals
Value: Learn the value of failing
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
How to be a proactive engineer (3 mins free version) 💵
If you want to take one thing with you from this article, it is this sentence: “Proactive engineers are the best kind of engineers!”. Learn what it means to be proactive, why proactive engineers are the best engineers, and why they get promoted first.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn how to be proactive
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
How Netflix Built a Distributed Counter for Billions of User Interactions (15 min)
In this system design piece, we get insight into how Netflix designed an internal system for counting —that’s right, just counting, nothing else. At Netflix’s scale, every feature becomes non-trivial to design due to strict non-functional requirements, and simple counting is no exception to that.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn how to design distributed counters
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
Is Big Tech becoming more cutthroat? (14 min free version) 💵
With the whole layoff wave swiping through the engineering industry, it feels like there is a culture shift going on. There are both layoffs focused on cutting costs and realigning investments as well as performance-based layoffs where engineers formerly known as “coasters” focused only on “rest-and-vest” are targeted.
Audience: Software Engineers / Engineering Managers
Value: Learn about performance management in BigTech
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
In Praise of "Normal" Engineers 🛠️ (6 min free version) 💵
recently gave us her view on the future of observability. Now, she is back with a guest post debunking the concept of a 10x engineer and proposing an alternative - the 10x engineering team. The argument is to stop obsessing over hiring rock stars, and instead work with “normal” engineers to set up your sociotechnical system in a way that induces 10x productivity.
Audience: Software Engineers / Engineering Managers
Value: Learn about the value of great engineering teams
ToT Rating: ⭐
The 5 intensity zones of software teams (4 min)
In this article,
talks about work intensity. He uses the analogy with heart rate zones, where you get in different zones depending on how intense your workout is. The article makes different work intensities explicit, which will help you as a manager to identify them and then communicate to your team or your manager why “switching zones” is important.Audience: Software Engineers / Engineering Managers
Value: Learn about work intensity
ToT Rating: ⭐
RAG: What is it and how to use it (4 min)
With everyone riding the generative AI wave 🌊 we are increasingly interacting with generative AI systems that produce output based on very specific knowledge bases (your company knowledge sources, tweets, tech/product documentation, etc.). In this article,
introduces us to the concept of RAG (read the article for the abbreviation definition). In the true spirit of solopreneurship, Orel learned this while working on a super cool tool for empowering newsletter authors.Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn what is RAG
ToT Rating: ⭐
AI or Die (6 min)
Ravi Gupta’s blog
We are closely reaching the stage in the AI evolution where we will have a “country of geniuses in a data center”. It is quite hard to predict how this will impact organizations and industries. This article aims to raise your awareness of the shift that is coming with AI so you do not get sidelined (which also reminds me of this brief piece by
).
Audience: All professionals
Value: Learn how AI will impact organizations
ToT Rating: ⭐
Eyes light up (ELU) (4 min)
Whenever you are presenting a topic, doing a demo, or introducing a new architectural approach, you want to make sure your audience is not bored 🥱. You want to see ELU (eyes light up 😍). In this article,
shares what are the clues you should look for when delivering a story to your audience.Audience: All professionals
Value: Learn how to read your audience
ToT Rating: ⭐
That’s all for last week!
See you on Thursday! 👋
Thanks for the mention man :)
I'd suggest you read Neo Kim's blog. Amazing stuff.