Getting promoted to Staff vs joining a company as a Staff. What's your take?

If you've been a Staff Eng for 5+ years, I would want to join any new company at least as a Staff level. The compensation difference between Senior (L5) and Staff (L6) is huge, especially in the equity components. The TC delta could be as much as $300K+/year or more.

So, yes, joining a new company as Staff is riskier, but if you care about money and career growth, it's hard to pass up the opportunity to come in at the higher level.

I'd also argue that you can bring some context over into a new company:

• You may have worked in a similar domain at a prior company (for example, hopping between the ad platform team at Facebook vs Google vs Snap is common)
• You may have worked with the new people in a prior company. For example, if you have a long (and strong) working relationship with the Tech Lead or manager in the new company, you can have added confidence that you can ramp up faster. You'll be able to anticipate how they work, and they'll spend more time with you.

I was hired at Staff (and that was first time with the Staff title). I didn't negotiate the title though—multiple companies leveled me at Staff after I interviewed with them. They were at a similar size and stage as my previous organization where I had the Senior title.

To me, the fact that I secured multiple offers at Staff was proof that I was under-leveled at my last org. :) (Meta was also interviewing me for E6 but I cut the loop short after I accepted an offer.)

The first few months were very busy, with a combination of understanding the landscape and proving myself along the lines you mentioned. But it wasn't a problem as I had extensive experience at Senior, designing and delivering a large platform that cut horizontally across my entire previous org.

A few months into joining though, there was a reorg and I found myself reporting to a Director of Engineering (who was later promoted to Sr. Director while I was still reporting to him). His expectations for Staff turned out to be quite different from the previous manager I'd briefly reported to!

So, we had some strategic conversations and the company sponsored coaching for me to work on the feedback. Since none of the feedback was about technical competency, I was able to turn things around within a few months—and even got the next raise.

This aside, I managed to be at the right place at the time in my Staff role, given the systems I got to build and the impact I had. Looking back, taking up this role was the single biggest growth spurt in my entire career!

If you're considering accepting another offer at Staff, I'm happy to chat about the specifics!

I 100% agree that it's much safer getting promoted into Staff vs. joining at Staff (assuming that it's your first Staff role) for all the reasons you mentioned. If I were to rank the scenarios that culminate in Staff from best to worst, it would be something like this:

1. Join at Senior, get organically promoted to Staff
2. Already be a stable Staff Engineer at your prior company, join at Staff
3. Be Senior at prior companies and successfully negotiate an uplevel to Staff

For #2, I do think that if you're already Staff at a comparable company, you should just join at Staff at your new one. The Senior -> Staff promotion takes a notoriously long time in 90%+ of cases.

#3 is particularly dangerous if you're going to a high-performance company like FAANG. I've worked with engineers at companies like Meta who successfully negotiated uplevels to senior/staff, and many of them were put on PIPs, cut immediately (no chance at PIP), or were barely hanging on (barely avoiding PIP).

• If you're not a Staff, but work/worked with a Staff in such a situation, what was your expectation over his/her arrival?
• Tips/suggestions to build all the items I described above joining as a Staff?

These 2 are very connected. Being a high-performing Staff Engineer is extremely context heavy. You need a deep understanding of the people, technology, and product space behind your organization. This means that I would expect a new Staff Engineer to be able to learn and absorb new context quickly. This is heavily dependent on your social skills, particularly communication. Almost every single Staff Engineer I have worked with had excellent communication skills (top 5%).

Because of this, the best thing for a new Staff Engineer to do is to talk to a bunch of people, earn trust quickly, and understand how things work overall. In terms of how things work, there are so many things they need to ingest:

1. What players exist, what decision-making powers they have, and what their incentives are
2. The current state of the product, what it's tried in the past, and its vision for the future
3. How teams get work done in the organization
4. The overall health of the codebase and change landing workflow

I talk about this all more in-depth here: "First 90 days - What to do as a Staff+ Engineer?"