A little meta commentary: I'm seeing a lot of negative takes using the word "they" (so presumably these are from people who either haven't worked in a staff eng

A little meta commentary: I'm seeing a lot of negative takes using the word "they" (so presumably these are from people who either haven't worked in a staff eng capacity, or have, but in dysfunctional organizations). The intent of this article (as I understand it) was to help people navigate the emerging nebulous role that "staff engineer" was, particularly as it started to become a more mainstream concept a few years ago (whereas prior to it, the dichotomy was largely that senior was "the" terminal IC role and you had to transition to management past that). Many engineers on the upper side of the senior spectrum have clearly been operating above and beyond what is typically considered senior level, but not in the capacity of a typical manager archetype, so this was meant to help people understand how to identify/categorize these people as well as help people understand what kinds of challenges to look at after you've become a "full-fledged" senior engineer. Resources are useful, whodathunkit. My advice for those eyeing for a staff+ level would be to avoid making "hot take" categories, everyone can do that and if they're coming from a position of inexperience w/ the subject matter, there's a good chance it's a bad take. Instead, try to derive action items from each of the archetypes, and incorporate those into your work. A good point I heard is that no staff engineer qualifies as a single archetype exclusively; the role is usually a mix of all archetypes, with different people leaning more strongly one way vs another. It's very easy to make sour comments like "oh staff people just spend all their time in meetings, what good are they for". It's quite another to be that staff engineer and have to balance technical depth acquisition, alignment among disparate groups and the multiplexing required to operate at high levels at both. It's easy to chalk it up to politics, but it's quite another to be able to visualize power structures as tools, and use them as such to accomplish large scale engineering goals. There are classes of engineering challenges that only really arise at the staff+ engineer level, and engaging with them can be rewarding in their own right.