Where I work almost all capable engineers are Staff Engineers. Based on the rubrics provided to make sense of our responsibilities we need to “initiate work that has org-wide impact”, “influence the company’s technological direction” and drive large scale multi-team projects.
Looking at my change lists from last year, I made a bunch of new models in our backend and wrote a few pages in React. Added monitoring, alerting and shipped the product pages. You know, your typical “software engineering” work.
What’s amazing is that I keep getting “exceeds expectations” ratings for this work because I ship things PMs want.
The hard part is self review time where I put my fantasy novel author hat on and spit out some bullshit on how my React components changed the technological direction of the company. Maybe this skill is what makes me a Staff Engineer!
Looking at my change lists from last year, I made a bunch of new models in our backend and wrote a few pages in React. Added monitoring, alerting and shipped the product pages. You know, your typical “software engineering” work.
What’s amazing is that I keep getting “exceeds expectations” ratings for this work because I ship things PMs want.
The hard part is self review time where I put my fantasy novel author hat on and spit out some bullshit on how my React components changed the technological direction of the company. Maybe this skill is what makes me a Staff Engineer!