> Often staff engineers end up with hand wavy designs with no clue about how it would get executed. They get defensive/frustrated when some senior engineer poin

> Often staff engineers end up with hand wavy designs with no clue about how it would get executed. They get defensive/frustrated when some senior engineer points out a flaw in their plan. This sounds like you've described an Architect (circa ~2003), rather than a Staff engineer of any standard. Perhaps your company has a serious engineering leadership problem. I'm sure this problem is common at many companies but I'm not sure this can be generalized to the Staff title.