Staff is really in a different level. You don't have local/team level technical challenges anymore, but more changes that run across teams and that affect mult

Staff is really in a different level. You don't have local/team level technical challenges anymore, but more changes that run across teams and that affect multiple teams. You need to be both technically adept, and people adept, and have some experience in multiple+ year projects or transitions and have seen both successes and failures over time. Companies that don't cater to them in some way, (i.e. give them freedom to operate), but leave most tech. decisions to management, end up in a bad place in the long term. Most career managers are removed from day to day coding, especially at the Director level, and often miss the small details that could derail a project. My take: Staff is seeing a resurgence, as a lot of companies are moving away from 'Team Lead' positions, which is half IC half manager positions. They see that it might be better to have a pure manager and pure IC roles, but you want to have the deep expertise of the team lead level engineers, hence the titles of Staff and Principle, which have been elevated recently. As in always, in some companies this is another inflated title, and in some it is actually respected and has more responsibilities. It all depends from company to company.