Getting to Staff in a competitive environment
Hi all,
I joined Airbnb about 6 months ago and have been told by my manager that I'm doing superbly and that he seems me becoming one of the top people in my org. I don't think he's the type to over-embellish or say things that aren't true so I believe him.
Given that, there's already a lot of strong senior and staff engineers in my team and org. How should I approach finding those juicier opportunities to make larger impacts outside of my immediate projects?
I'm one of the most productive engineers on my team right now but finding those high-leverage and larger impact projects on my own has always been challenging for me. I'm not an ideas person but I'm a solid executor.
Recently, I've been on a really large project that was simply handed to me and one that I'm not leading that's taken up the entire company's time but after this is all over, I'd like to start brainstorming and executing on some of these more unique and high-impact projects that can help me become a Staff engineer. I want to get into a position where I'm driving high-impact projects that ideally I come up with.
Would appreciate some advice on how to approach my current situation and work towards this goal.
Thanks!
Discussion
(2 comments)- 2
23 days agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroCongrats on getting the great feedback! That's a great way to start your journey at Airbnb, which I personally consider one of the best tech companies out there.
Creating Staff scope is obviously difficult - If it wasn't, then far more people would be Staff and the title would lose most of its meaning. There isn't exactly a playbook to create scope as it varies wildly based on company, team, and tech stack, but there's a bunch of ideas here: "How do I come up with innovative, impactful ideas and bring them to my team?"
At a very high-level, I recommend:
- Look for problems - From there, work backwards from them to create the opportunity as that's why any of us do anything, to solve genuine problems that real people have, either teammates or end-users.
- Talking to a bunch of people and listening to their complaints - Engineers love to complain, so it's not too hard extracting this feedback from them once you have a decent relationship.
- For anything you work on, think about how you can expand its benefit - Expanding scope is way, way easier than creating scope from scratch. It's a much more organic action, and you'll face less opposition.
I also highly recommend our Senior -> Staff course which has case studies for inspiration on how to find that scope: Grow From Senior To Staff Engineer: L5 To L6
- 023 days agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
As a senior engineer, you can work hard and do everything right and still not have a real case to get promoted to staff engineer.
This is because opportunity is unevenly distributed in a company, and even in a team. You need to navigate toward projects and people with high impact. I talk about a few ideas to do this in this lesson: https://www.jointaro.com/course/grow-from-senior-to-staff-engineer-l5-to-l6/finding-the-right-team/
