As a Senior engineer, how do I know if I’m operating at the Staff level?

<p>When you&rsquo;re a senior-level engineer (i.e., focused on being impactful in a single team), it&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;re operating at a Staff+ level, you&rsquo;re taking fewer tickets from the team&rsquo;s sprint/backlog because the rest of your workload is cross-team. It should feel like you&rsquo;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&rsquo;re doing work equivalent to a Staff+ engineer?</strong></p> <p>Look for an existing Staff+ engineer that aligns with your&nbsp;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&rsquo;re a business partner or leader and compare yourself to a technologist, you&rsquo;ll think you need to build something heavily used in the company to be Staff, which isn&rsquo;t the only path.</p> <p><a href="https://medium.com/staff-engineering-learnings/as-a-senior-engineer-how-do-i-know-if-im-operating-at-the-staff-level-7199d801904b">Visit Now</a></p>