I've also been frustrated by the inconsistency in the roles/expectation for a Staff+ engineer. At a previous employer, as I advanced up the ladder, management r

I've also been frustrated by the inconsistency in the roles/expectation for a Staff+ engineer. At a previous employer, as I advanced up the ladder, management repeatedly changed and strongly committed to an org structure and processes which made it extremely difficult for an IC to have impact beyond a single team. By the end, I was a principal, but reported to a line manager, had zero access to the planning/prioritization/roadmapping beyond my immediate team, and was effectively just the sr engineer to whom they handed messy or complex projects. Le sigh. I've come to the belief that in a broad range of circumstances, high level ICs aren't especially critical. There's quite a lot an engineering org can do with sharp senior engineers working on relatively autonomous teams overseen by a couple tiers of managers who may have little understanding of the technical domain. Adding some ICs who e.g. report to a VP and jump back and forth between areas can be seen to complicate processes, planning etc. We want technical impact above the level of a single team, which often means cross-cutting concerns or improvements which pass through several systems. But in many cases, even without a technical IC who has a technical view of the larger picture, narrowly-scoped teams can still come to a decent if sometimes convoluted local optima. My conclusion is if you like building stuff, but you get bored of building the same stuff, and you don't want to people-manage, there are basically three options: - pursue a staff+ role at a large organization which can't afford not to have those engineers contributing at a higher level. If not FAANG, now there is a tier of slightly smaller public or late-stage private companies who can't avoid having high-level technical experts -- but competition is pretty fierce - some form of consulting which allows one to move between technical projects - keep changing fields to do sr level engineering in an unfamiliar area - retire early, and putter on open source This year I moved from a principal role to a staff role which lets me explore some areas of technical interest which weren't used at my previous company. If staff doesn't let me have sufficiently broad impact, at least I get to explore a new technical area. And perhaps it will be my last job. _But_, an option which I haven't really seen, but which I must exist out there somewhere, and would love to hear about is if there are some niche companies that actually appropriately value engineers with many years of experience. If one believes that these experiences let us anticipate upcoming issues, design better solutions, pick up new tools and frameworks faster etc, and requires less from people managers, then shouldn't there be room for a company which disproportionately hires very experienced engineers, compensates them appropriately, and produces better/faster/lighter solutions?