8 ms·

What a Senior Staff Software Engineer Does

115 points by vinnyglennon 7y ago

codingdave 7y ago
I find it interesting that a culture is being described here where Senior Engineers are considered lower level, with multiple higher levels above that. It just goes to show that titles mean different things at different companies, and you cannot generalize across this industry. I've had the "Staff Software Engineer" title once in my career. It was at IBM, in the 90s, where it was a was a title given to anyone who was not junior. I had it in my first ever coding role, while I was still learning to code. How the title changed from meaning "Generic Staff Member" in the 90s to "Above Senior" today, I have no idea. In any case, the job described does mesh well with what I see most "Senior Engineers" doing. So the article in general is a good idea of where long-term growth as an engineer will take you.
- delish 7y ago
  > How the title changed from meaning "Generic Staff Member" in the 90s to "Above Senior" today, I have no idea. Indeed. I'm also curious about the change in identification over time.
  - dpup 7y ago
    I haven't been able to track down an original source for this, but while at Google in mid 2000s I was told it was a joke/hat-tip to Bell labs.
- dkasper 7y ago
  I think it became widespread because Google named their levels that way. Not sure of the origin of the title at Google though.
  - chucksmash 7y ago
    My feeling is that it traces from the institution of staff officers in the military: > General staff: in the military, a group of officers that assists the commander of a division or larger unit by formulating and disseminating his policies, transmitting his orders, and overseeing their execution. Normally a general staff is organized along functional lines, with separate sections for administration, intelligence, operations, training, logistics, and other categories.[1] [1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/general-staff https://www.britannica.com/topic/general-staff
  - mceachen 7y ago
    Google probably got the terminology from Bell Labs. A "Member of Technical Staff" was for PHDs or very accomplished engineers. See https://www.quora.com/When-did-Bell-Labs-add-the-Distinguished-Member-of-Technical-Staff-title https://www.quora.com/When-did-Bell-Labs-add-the-Distinguish...
- didgeoridoo 7y ago
  I always thought it was intended to differentiate “line” engineers (charged with the core work product) from “staff” engineers (focused on advising and supporting the org more broadly): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staff_and_line https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staff_and_line
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    I think we should have Line Engineers and Guards Engineers.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  At my last company entry level was 'Senior'. Only interns were in a level below.
- matchagaucho 7y ago
  "Staff" is one of several military terms that have made its way into business job titles. When used properly, it should refer to someone who supports front line roles. The ratio of Staff to Line in IT is generally 7:1. The OP cites spending ~50% of her time on creating scrum tasks; very much a staff function.
  - sethammons 7y ago
    > I only spend around half my time on tasks directly for my scrum team That does not mean half her time is spent making tickets. This could be code writing, code reviews, testing, meetings, agendas, designing or ideating new systems or improvements, and, also, making tickets.
- zuhayeer 7y ago
  There’s a lot of asymmetry in leveling titles / nomenclature. A friend and I ended up building http://levels.fyi http://levels.fyi to help map these titles across different companies, they certainly don’t mean the same thing everywhere
draw_down 7y ago
Call me unambitious but I think I’d rather just write some code every day.
- bt848 7y ago
  Same. Just be who you are. The tech industry “growth expectations” culture is garbage. Just as a personal anecdote everyone told me constantly that I would never make Staff Engineer at Google (roughly the 90th percentile rank) by just contributing to the code base. But that is what I did, and I was promoted to that rank. And I got the satisfaction of not participating in all the anti patterns of “leadership “ where one person gets promoted for taking credit for the work of many other people, or for solving problems they also created, etc. In short I rather admire a trade like dentistry or carpentry where one just practices one’s skills to the best of their ability, and there is no such thing as “Senior Staff Dentist”.
- codingdave 7y ago
  There is nothing wrong with knowing what you like to do, and doing it. And having folk like you on a team is important - teams struggle whenever everyone is jockeying for a better position. So while "unambitious" can get a negative connotation, it deserves more respect - it gets the job done, and that is valuable.
  - draw_down 7y ago
    Mmm, being the only non-striver on a team full of them also sounds like a bad time, a recipe for becoming under-valued. There is a condescension to this thing where people say “hey, that’s ok too” when it’s actually not ok for themselves. I can accept that, it is what it is, but it’s definitely there.
    - fizx 7y ago
      I have a non-striver on my team of strivers. He is quite valued, because he's: - always fun to be around (a consequence of not being overloaded) - the guy to say "the emperor has no clothes" (having time to look around does that) - always accurate with his estimates (because he really doesn't want to work overtime) - always high-quality with his output (because he's not rushed) Done right, working at 80% speed means that you have 20% of your time to pick up the super-high-value tasks that might otherwise fall by the wayside. Now, maybe he'll get promoted more slowly than his potential as a striver, but I don't actually think that's going to happen.
nightski 7y ago
I'm sure this just suits some people's fancy but the idea of being in a "track" is so off putting and mind numbing to me. Ooh here is where I'll be exactly in 5, 10, 15 years. So exciting /s. So glad I went self employed almost a decade ago.
- 0xDEFC0DE 7y ago
  It's more exciting if I'm making $300k google salaries at the end of the track. A track with 6-7 difficult rungs and +10% pay increase? nah, I'm good.
  - pmorais 7y ago
    I mean, once you hit a certain salary more money doesn’t even appreciably increase your quality of life. And I think most good software engineers are already close to that asymptote
    - ummonk 7y ago
      Have you looked at house prices in the Bay Area recently?
    - 0xDEFC0DE 7y ago
      >I mean, once you hit a certain salary more money doesn’t even appreciably increase your quality of life Not for my definitions of quality of life!
    - barrkel 7y ago
      This has not been my experience. I can easily see ways to substantially increase my quality of life at $1 million per year, and at $10 million per year, neither of which I'm close to (unless my lottery tickets, I mean options, pay off).
      - Scene_Cast2 7y ago
        Ignoring early retirement, consider that those salaries come with less free time, less brain cells to do what you like, and more stress. A lot of the value you can gain from money (e.g. hiring a maid to clean & cook, buying better quality food) is about clawing back what you lost to get the extra money.
delish 7y ago
I read the article once and thought, "So at Box a senior staff SWE is differentiated from a senior SWE by mentoring others, and in so doing, has a greater impact. And senior staff is still in the technical track, not the management track. What does the author (or, What do HN commentators) think are the differences between mentoring and managing? Other than the obvious of course." I read it again--I liked the article--and saw that the article talks about too many kinds of staff-level contributions, including kinds of mentorship, for my question to be relevant. I'm still interested enough to pose: I had thought elevation of the technical track to "equal" the management track was a response to technical employees "needing" to go-into-management-and-deal-with-people in order to advance their careers. So now it would seem to me that the technical track is absorbing some of the functions of the management track. That's assuming that mentoring is related to managing.
- itronitron 7y ago
  All of these level requirements are tacked on by the HR department because they are required for advancement in non-technical roles. Unfortunately they really foul up personal dynamics as some people believe they need to 'mentor' their colleagues in order to fulfill the responsibilities of their job title... how fucking condescending is that?
  - mplanchard 7y ago
    This seems like a really uncharitable view of mentorship. I have never felt condescended to when I was being mentored by someone with more skills or experience in any of my jobs, and I certainly hope that the people I help through one on ones, code review, and pairing now don’t feel as though there’s any condescension in it. I think mostly, we all just want to become as good as we can be at our jobs.
    - itronitron 7y ago
      If everyone wants to become as good as they can at their jobs then why call out mentoring as a special activity? People should already be helping their colleagues perform better at their jobs without incentivizing it as a checkbox for career advancement.
generated 7y ago
Are the tracks actually parallel? Had she gone into management after 5 years, how would the compensation, promotion opportunities, or job opportunities have differed? I see many people go into management because they think it's the only way to continue to grow a career.
- danpalmer 7y ago
  Where this has been implemented well, the limitation is essentially C-suite level, because those are the highest level and inherently management positions, however it's common for something along the lines of Principle/Fellow/Distinguished engineers (terminology differs) to be equivalent to the step down from C level. That said, while these roles don't include management, they may end up being mostly outreach rather than the individual contributions to the company codebase that a senior engineer might be doing.
  - ohazi 7y ago
    I've never seen an organization both credibly claim that their tracks had equivalent benefits (e.g. similar compensation), and also have comparable leveling requirements for both tracks. The bar for going up the management track is always lower. The difference at some companies is so stark that they sometimes feel the need to justify it with statements like "the title of fellow is reserved for truly world class engineers with a lifetime of achievement and wide-reaching industry acclaim" when no such requirement exists anywhere up the management ladder, including (and sometimes especially) in the C-suite. Management is essentially gaslighting you into thinking that you're not as valuable as they are unless you're Linus Torvalds. That's a level at which any comparison is obviously laughable, but the break-even point is usually far lower than this, and the organization wants to do everything it can to keep you from figuring that out. The majority of highly paid managers at large companies simply don't provide much value compared to a reasonably productive engineer. The concept of an "equivalent technical track" is a bone they throw at you so that you don't rage quit. So looking at this strictly as a numbers game, you're almost always worse off on the technical track. That doesn't mean you should go into management -- I just think it's important to know the true costs when making this sort of choice.
scarface74 7y ago
Working for mostly smaller companies, titles haven’t really meant anything. My influence came mostly from using the other two levers in the organization - building relationships and building a reputation. I have a lot more influence over the technical/infrastructure direction of the company I work for now as “just” a senior developer than I ever had at my last company where I was officially the Dev lead with dotted line reports. There to get anything done I had to go through layers of red tape. Where I am now, I’ll use my own discretion on whether I should let the manager know or do everything in the Dev AWS Account (or create another account), do a proof of concept and let them know. Most of the time I either get the okay or a few tweaks or suggested. And before I get the replies from the infrastructure gatekeepers. Yes, I’m qualified to make infrastructure decisions and I’ve been browbeaten enough across three jobs to know about compliance issues (HIPAA in our case) inside and out.
- blub 7y ago
  The compliance seems to rely on you not making mistakes or taking malicious actions, which doesn't really qualify as compliance IMO.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Compliance involves encryption at rest and in transit and with cloud providers making sure you only use HIPAA compliant services, getting BSA’s with external contractors, minimizing who is allowed access to data, etc. It’s more complicated than this but this is a good overview. https://www.hipaajournal.com/hipaa-compliance-checklist/ https://www.hipaajournal.com/hipaa-compliance-checklist/
- javanaut 7y ago
  I agree. I have only developed software for multinationals and did a stint of short term freelancing for same. Titles are important within orgs but don't really translate across them, in my opinion.
zahreeley 7y ago
What is Box ?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
cybersol 7y ago
The follow-up blog she linked at the bottom is even better at describing the mindset of a technical leader, which will take you far in any organization no matter what your current title is.
AdrianB1 7y ago
The main supplier in the area I am working is a huge US company with many different divisions, including a software engineering one. I am working with more a couple of dozens people that have "Senior", "Staff", "Principal" and "Engineer" words in the title, in combinations of 2 or 3 of these words, but it totally makes no sense to me if I am looking at the expertise, effectiveness of their work and the influence/decision power they have: they are all skilled workers with fancy but meaningless titles.
ggg3 7y ago
sounds like the company is either crazy busy designing new breakthroughs in tech or there are so many (undocumented) skeletons in the closet that nobody who joined less than 5years ago can step without triggering a landmine.

115 points by vinnyglennon 7y ago

I find it interesting that a culture is being described here where Senior Engineers are considered lower level, with multiple higher levels above that. It just goes to show that titles mean different things at different companies, and you cannot generalize across this industry. I've had the "Staff Software Engineer" title once in my career. It was at IBM, in the 90s, where it was a was a title given to anyone who was not junior. I had it in my first ever coding role, while I was still learning to code. How the title changed from meaning "Generic Staff Member" in the 90s to "Above Senior" today, I have no idea. In any case, the job described does mesh well with what I see most "Senior Engineers" doing. So the article in general is a good idea of where long-term growth as an engineer will take you.

delish 7y ago
> How the title changed from meaning "Generic Staff Member" in the 90s to "Above Senior" today, I have no idea. Indeed. I'm also curious about the change in identification over time.
- dpup 7y ago
  I haven't been able to track down an original source for this, but while at Google in mid 2000s I was told it was a joke/hat-tip to Bell labs.
dkasper 7y ago
I think it became widespread because Google named their levels that way. Not sure of the origin of the title at Google though.
- chucksmash 7y ago
  My feeling is that it traces from the institution of staff officers in the military: > General staff: in the military, a group of officers that assists the commander of a division or larger unit by formulating and disseminating his policies, transmitting his orders, and overseeing their execution. Normally a general staff is organized along functional lines, with separate sections for administration, intelligence, operations, training, logistics, and other categories.[1] [1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/general-staff https://www.britannica.com/topic/general-staff
- mceachen 7y ago
  Google probably got the terminology from Bell Labs. A "Member of Technical Staff" was for PHDs or very accomplished engineers. See https://www.quora.com/When-did-Bell-Labs-add-the-Distinguished-Member-of-Technical-Staff-title https://www.quora.com/When-did-Bell-Labs-add-the-Distinguish...
didgeoridoo 7y ago
I always thought it was intended to differentiate “line” engineers (charged with the core work product) from “staff” engineers (focused on advising and supporting the org more broadly): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staff_and_line https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staff_and_line
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  I think we should have Line Engineers and Guards Engineers.
chrisseaton 7y ago
At my last company entry level was 'Senior'. Only interns were in a level below.
matchagaucho 7y ago
"Staff" is one of several military terms that have made its way into business job titles. When used properly, it should refer to someone who supports front line roles. The ratio of Staff to Line in IT is generally 7:1. The OP cites spending ~50% of her time on creating scrum tasks; very much a staff function.
- sethammons 7y ago
  > I only spend around half my time on tasks directly for my scrum team That does not mean half her time is spent making tickets. This could be code writing, code reviews, testing, meetings, agendas, designing or ideating new systems or improvements, and, also, making tickets.
zuhayeer 7y ago
There’s a lot of asymmetry in leveling titles / nomenclature. A friend and I ended up building http://levels.fyi http://levels.fyi to help map these titles across different companies, they certainly don’t mean the same thing everywhere

draw_down 7y ago

Call me unambitious but I think I’d rather just write some code every day.

bt848 7y ago
Same. Just be who you are. The tech industry “growth expectations” culture is garbage. Just as a personal anecdote everyone told me constantly that I would never make Staff Engineer at Google (roughly the 90th percentile rank) by just contributing to the code base. But that is what I did, and I was promoted to that rank. And I got the satisfaction of not participating in all the anti patterns of “leadership “ where one person gets promoted for taking credit for the work of many other people, or for solving problems they also created, etc. In short I rather admire a trade like dentistry or carpentry where one just practices one’s skills to the best of their ability, and there is no such thing as “Senior Staff Dentist”.
codingdave 7y ago
There is nothing wrong with knowing what you like to do, and doing it. And having folk like you on a team is important - teams struggle whenever everyone is jockeying for a better position. So while "unambitious" can get a negative connotation, it deserves more respect - it gets the job done, and that is valuable.
- draw_down 7y ago
  Mmm, being the only non-striver on a team full of them also sounds like a bad time, a recipe for becoming under-valued. There is a condescension to this thing where people say “hey, that’s ok too” when it’s actually not ok for themselves. I can accept that, it is what it is, but it’s definitely there.
  - fizx 7y ago
    I have a non-striver on my team of strivers. He is quite valued, because he's: - always fun to be around (a consequence of not being overloaded) - the guy to say "the emperor has no clothes" (having time to look around does that) - always accurate with his estimates (because he really doesn't want to work overtime) - always high-quality with his output (because he's not rushed) Done right, working at 80% speed means that you have 20% of your time to pick up the super-high-value tasks that might otherwise fall by the wayside. Now, maybe he'll get promoted more slowly than his potential as a striver, but I don't actually think that's going to happen.

nightski 7y ago

I'm sure this just suits some people's fancy but the idea of being in a "track" is so off putting and mind numbing to me. Ooh here is where I'll be exactly in 5, 10, 15 years. So exciting /s. So glad I went self employed almost a decade ago.

0xDEFC0DE 7y ago
It's more exciting if I'm making $300k google salaries at the end of the track. A track with 6-7 difficult rungs and +10% pay increase? nah, I'm good.
- pmorais 7y ago
  I mean, once you hit a certain salary more money doesn’t even appreciably increase your quality of life. And I think most good software engineers are already close to that asymptote
  - ummonk 7y ago
    Have you looked at house prices in the Bay Area recently?
  - 0xDEFC0DE 7y ago
    >I mean, once you hit a certain salary more money doesn’t even appreciably increase your quality of life Not for my definitions of quality of life!
  - barrkel 7y ago
    This has not been my experience. I can easily see ways to substantially increase my quality of life at $1 million per year, and at $10 million per year, neither of which I'm close to (unless my lottery tickets, I mean options, pay off).
    - Scene_Cast2 7y ago
      Ignoring early retirement, consider that those salaries come with less free time, less brain cells to do what you like, and more stress. A lot of the value you can gain from money (e.g. hiring a maid to clean & cook, buying better quality food) is about clawing back what you lost to get the extra money.

delish 7y ago

I read the article once and thought, "So at Box a senior staff SWE is differentiated from a senior SWE by mentoring others, and in so doing, has a greater impact. And senior staff is still in the technical track, not the management track. What does the author (or, What do HN commentators) think are the differences between mentoring and managing? Other than the obvious of course." I read it again--I liked the article--and saw that the article talks about too many kinds of staff-level contributions, including kinds of mentorship, for my question to be relevant. I'm still interested enough to pose: I had thought elevation of the technical track to "equal" the management track was a response to technical employees "needing" to go-into-management-and-deal-with-people in order to advance their careers. So now it would seem to me that the technical track is absorbing some of the functions of the management track. That's assuming that mentoring is related to managing.

itronitron 7y ago
All of these level requirements are tacked on by the HR department because they are required for advancement in non-technical roles. Unfortunately they really foul up personal dynamics as some people believe they need to 'mentor' their colleagues in order to fulfill the responsibilities of their job title... how fucking condescending is that?
- mplanchard 7y ago
  This seems like a really uncharitable view of mentorship. I have never felt condescended to when I was being mentored by someone with more skills or experience in any of my jobs, and I certainly hope that the people I help through one on ones, code review, and pairing now don’t feel as though there’s any condescension in it. I think mostly, we all just want to become as good as we can be at our jobs.
  - itronitron 7y ago
    If everyone wants to become as good as they can at their jobs then why call out mentoring as a special activity? People should already be helping their colleagues perform better at their jobs without incentivizing it as a checkbox for career advancement.

generated 7y ago

Are the tracks actually parallel? Had she gone into management after 5 years, how would the compensation, promotion opportunities, or job opportunities have differed? I see many people go into management because they think it's the only way to continue to grow a career.

danpalmer 7y ago
Where this has been implemented well, the limitation is essentially C-suite level, because those are the highest level and inherently management positions, however it's common for something along the lines of Principle/Fellow/Distinguished engineers (terminology differs) to be equivalent to the step down from C level. That said, while these roles don't include management, they may end up being mostly outreach rather than the individual contributions to the company codebase that a senior engineer might be doing.
- ohazi 7y ago
  I've never seen an organization both credibly claim that their tracks had equivalent benefits (e.g. similar compensation), and also have comparable leveling requirements for both tracks. The bar for going up the management track is always lower. The difference at some companies is so stark that they sometimes feel the need to justify it with statements like "the title of fellow is reserved for truly world class engineers with a lifetime of achievement and wide-reaching industry acclaim" when no such requirement exists anywhere up the management ladder, including (and sometimes especially) in the C-suite. Management is essentially gaslighting you into thinking that you're not as valuable as they are unless you're Linus Torvalds. That's a level at which any comparison is obviously laughable, but the break-even point is usually far lower than this, and the organization wants to do everything it can to keep you from figuring that out. The majority of highly paid managers at large companies simply don't provide much value compared to a reasonably productive engineer. The concept of an "equivalent technical track" is a bone they throw at you so that you don't rage quit. So looking at this strictly as a numbers game, you're almost always worse off on the technical track. That doesn't mean you should go into management -- I just think it's important to know the true costs when making this sort of choice.

scarface74 7y ago

Working for mostly smaller companies, titles haven’t really meant anything. My influence came mostly from using the other two levers in the organization - building relationships and building a reputation. I have a lot more influence over the technical/infrastructure direction of the company I work for now as “just” a senior developer than I ever had at my last company where I was officially the Dev lead with dotted line reports. There to get anything done I had to go through layers of red tape. Where I am now, I’ll use my own discretion on whether I should let the manager know or do everything in the Dev AWS Account (or create another account), do a proof of concept and let them know. Most of the time I either get the okay or a few tweaks or suggested. And before I get the replies from the infrastructure gatekeepers. Yes, I’m qualified to make infrastructure decisions and I’ve been browbeaten enough across three jobs to know about compliance issues (HIPAA in our case) inside and out.

blub 7y ago
The compliance seems to rely on you not making mistakes or taking malicious actions, which doesn't really qualify as compliance IMO.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Compliance involves encryption at rest and in transit and with cloud providers making sure you only use HIPAA compliant services, getting BSA’s with external contractors, minimizing who is allowed access to data, etc. It’s more complicated than this but this is a good overview. https://www.hipaajournal.com/hipaa-compliance-checklist/ https://www.hipaajournal.com/hipaa-compliance-checklist/
javanaut 7y ago
I agree. I have only developed software for multinationals and did a stint of short term freelancing for same. Titles are important within orgs but don't really translate across them, in my opinion.

zahreeley 7y ago

What is Box ?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

cybersol 7y ago

The follow-up blog she linked at the bottom is even better at describing the mindset of a technical leader, which will take you far in any organization no matter what your current title is.

AdrianB1 7y ago

The main supplier in the area I am working is a huge US company with many different divisions, including a software engineering one. I am working with more a couple of dozens people that have "Senior", "Staff", "Principal" and "Engineer" words in the title, in combinations of 2 or 3 of these words, but it totally makes no sense to me if I am looking at the expertise, effectiveness of their work and the influence/decision power they have: they are all skilled workers with fancy but meaningless titles.

ggg3 7y ago

sounds like the company is either crazy busy designing new breakthroughs in tech or there are so many (undocumented) skeletons in the closet that nobody who joined less than 5years ago can step without triggering a landmine.