As a Senior engineer, how do I know if I’m operating at the Staff level?
<p>When you’re a senior-level engineer (i.e., focused on being impactful in a single team), it’s hard to tell how far you are from being Staff+ in impact. Here are a few questions I ask folks around heuristics that can indicate when you’re near or at a Staff+ level.</p>
<p><strong>Does it feel like you have one foot in the team and one foot out of it?</strong></p>
<p>When you’re operating at a Staff+ level, you’re taking fewer tickets from the team’s sprint/backlog because the rest of your workload is cross-team. It should feel like you’re contributing less to your team. It should feel like your standup updates on the cross-team work are not relevant/important to your main team (your manager should find them important though).</p>
<p><strong>Do you feel like you’re doing work equivalent to a Staff+ engineer?</strong></p>
<p>Look for an existing Staff+ engineer that aligns with your engineering archetypes. Comparing yourself to an engineer that is stronger in different archetypes than you will be an unfair comparison and may skew your interpretation of Staff+; e.g., if you’re a business partner or leader and compare yourself to a technologist, you’ll think you need to build something heavily used in the company to be Staff, which isn’t the only path.</p>
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