A lot of small and medium companies don't really know what to do with Staff Engineers. Not knowing what else to do, they default to something like the "Right Ha

A lot of small and medium companies don't really know what to do with Staff Engineers. Not knowing what else to do, they default to something like the "Right Hand" archetype in this document, where they're reporting to someone important but lacking in any direct authority or accountability of their own. These positions can be very comfortable if the person isn't directly responsible for anything, but they can use their leadership-adjacent position to come in and take credit for successes on anything they touch. I worked at one particularly miserable company where the CEO's "Right Hand" engineer would be dispatched any time a project was running behind schedule. Lo and behold, the work would be delivered slightly after the deadline by the slightly behind schedule team, but the credit for the "turnaround" went to the CEO's "Right Hand". These positions can also be awful if the company puts unreasonable expectations on the Staff Engineer but doesn't actually give them the authority to execute. If you've been tasked with delivering a large initiative but you haven't been given any employees to do it with, your only option is to influence other teams to work on it with you. When it comes down to it, people are going to work on things for the person who determines their raises and performance reviews, not a floating Staff Engineer who needs people to help them. This is why "Team Lead" and maybe "Solver" are the only two of these archetypes that are sustainable for a company, IMO. Letting Staff Engineers sort of float around in the company and spread their knowledge sounds good in theory, but in practice you need to carefully assign them into the org structure like everyone else.