The Staff Engineer's Path
The practical companion to the staff engineer question: how to pick what to work on, how to influence without authority, and how to lead technical work across teams you do not manage. Specific rather than inspirational.
Book
Career Growth
Tanya Reilly
4 to 6 weeks
Advanced
About $45
What it is
A book about doing the senior individual contributor job, organised around three things: the big picture, execution, and levelling up the people around you.
What makes it useful rather than motivational
It is concrete about the parts that are genuinely hard. How to choose between five worthwhile problems when you can only do one. How to write a design document that actually gets read and agreed to. How to be right without being unpleasant, and how to disagree with a decision and then support it. How to know when your job is to do the work and when it is to make sure someone else can.
Who should read it
Senior engineers who have noticed that continuing to be an excellent programmer is no longer producing progress, and are unsure what the new job is.
Best for: senior engineers moving toward staff, and staff engineers who arrived without a map.
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