tl;dr:Staff Engineers sit at the intersection of technical leadership and organizational impact, but their role is often misunderstood. While they share technical accountability with Engineering Managers, Staff Engineers are uniquely positioned to work across multiple teams, focusing on complex systems and technical strategy rather than people management. Alex elaborates in this post.
tl;dr:“Today after 23 years, I have a relatively high level leadership position but it wasn’t always like this. As an introvert in a world that’s optimized for extroverts I had a long and painful learning curve.” Alex provides us with tips he's learned and mistakes he's made applying for jobs at Datadog, Spotify and Shopify.
tl;dr:Alex discusses how "Tech Debt Friday" started at his org, what was learned and how it's executed: (1) We spend 10% of our time to deal with tech debt. (2) The first rule is not to create debt in the first place. (3) The PR that creates tech debt should come paired with the issue to deal with it. And more.
tl;dr:"One of the things that I catch myself doing more and more as a staff engineer is to help individuals, teams or sometimes the organization reach clarity. I’m no oracle and this is not rocket science but in this article I’d like to go meta and clarify the process of reaching clarity with some examples."
tl;dr:(1) Don’t fight the tools: libraries, language, platform, etc. Use as much native constructs as possible. (2) You don’t write the code for the machines, you write it for your colleagues and your future self. (3) Deprecate yourself. Don’t be the go-to person for the code. (4) Any significant and rewarding piece of software is the result of collaboration. And more.