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No, Staffs are suppose to be focused on the technical implementation of the product, not on the minute of everyone’s work. Most of what you describe are EMs. St

No, Staffs are suppose to be focused on the technical implementation of the product, not on the minute of everyone’s work. Most of what you describe are EMs. Staff/Sr Staff/Principals should be steering the high level architecture, tech debt refactoring, migration strategy, etc and still get in the weeds to implement said architectures. They have the technical experience to do it, trying to extinguish that experience by pushing them into administrative roles is a complete waste of their talent and experience. They’re being pushed until these administrative roles because Directors have no idea how to leverage their talent and default to putting them into EM-like roles because that’s what they do but again, it’s a waste of talent and experience.

ryandrake 2y ago
I've been working in the industry for huge, medium and small companies for 25+ years and have never seen a purely technical role above "Senior" level. Open to the idea that they may exist, but I think you're describing some kind of theoretical ideal that is rare in reality.
- halfmatthalfcat 2y ago
  I’ve worked at multiple orgs where this is actually the case. Not sure what to say other than they exist and I hope you can work at a place like that one day, it’s awesome.
  - janderson215 2y ago
    I used to work at a place where I could do things of value, but my role has changed to putting out fires that are (to my eye) manufactured by our acquiring company and silly admin things that I have now responsibility of, but no agency in. Ex: they need me to do a performance review of my reports, but don’t let me give them the rating or raise I think they deserve despite the decision makers never having a single conversation with my reports. Nobody knows our codebase as well as me because I built it. My output of customer value has dropped to 10% of what it used to be and I don’t think it would be possible today to build the things we built pre-acquisition that made us valuable in the first place. Thankfully we were able to hire another engineer who is very good and has been able to keep up with internal and external requests. I am thankful he’s been able to get up to speed so I don’t leave my coworkers high and dry. At 35 years old, I’m cooked, Chat. Thriving at a megacorp with these management styles is orthogonal to delivering value to customers.
js8 2y ago
> They’re being pushed until these administrative roles because Directors have no idea how to leverage their talent and default to putting them into EM-like roles I think the explanation is simpler, I suspect it's just many people have a desire to be in a different role or multiple roles. Also, successful generalists tend to think everyone should be a generalist. That's why they muddle the role descriptions in their heads.

ryandrake 2y ago

I've been working in the industry for huge, medium and small companies for 25+ years and have never seen a purely technical role above "Senior" level. Open to the idea that they may exist, but I think you're describing some kind of theoretical ideal that is rare in reality.

halfmatthalfcat 2y ago
I’ve worked at multiple orgs where this is actually the case. Not sure what to say other than they exist and I hope you can work at a place like that one day, it’s awesome.
- janderson215 2y ago
  I used to work at a place where I could do things of value, but my role has changed to putting out fires that are (to my eye) manufactured by our acquiring company and silly admin things that I have now responsibility of, but no agency in. Ex: they need me to do a performance review of my reports, but don’t let me give them the rating or raise I think they deserve despite the decision makers never having a single conversation with my reports. Nobody knows our codebase as well as me because I built it. My output of customer value has dropped to 10% of what it used to be and I don’t think it would be possible today to build the things we built pre-acquisition that made us valuable in the first place. Thankfully we were able to hire another engineer who is very good and has been able to keep up with internal and external requests. I am thankful he’s been able to get up to speed so I don’t leave my coworkers high and dry. At 35 years old, I’m cooked, Chat. Thriving at a megacorp with these management styles is orthogonal to delivering value to customers.

js8 2y ago

> They’re being pushed until these administrative roles because Directors have no idea how to leverage their talent and default to putting them into EM-like roles I think the explanation is simpler, I suspect it's just many people have a desire to be in a different role or multiple roles. Also, successful generalists tend to think everyone should be a generalist. That's why they muddle the role descriptions in their heads.