What's your staff engineer archetype?
Just went through Rahul's amazing course on how to grow from L5 to L6. Excited to learn the different staff engineer archetypes that exist.
I'm curious what your Staff Engineer archetype is. At what point in your career (and how) did you start identifying your archetype, and strengthening it? Once a staff engineer falls into an archetype, do they generally change over time, or do they fix on their archetype for the rest of their life?
![Senior Software Engineer [E5] at Meta company logo](/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffirebasestorage.googleapis.com%2Fv0%2Fb%2Ftech-career-growth.appspot.com%2Fo%2Fcompany_logos%252Fmeta.jpeg%3Falt%3Dmedia%26token%3Da7a5bcc0-e178-4b5b-b71e-09bf6c6aefae&w=48&q=75){kind=small}
![Entry-Level Software Engineer [L3] at Google company logo](/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffirebasestorage.googleapis.com%2Fv0%2Fb%2Ftech-career-growth.appspot.com%2Fo%2Fcompany_logos%252Fgoogle.jpeg%3Falt%3Dmedia%26token%3D780356ef-3efc-4728-9eb4-d909b75bb4a6&w=48&q=75){kind=small}
Discussion
(2 comments)- 12 months agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
My Staff Eng archetype was most closely aligned to Product Hybrid (or perhaps parts of Generalist). I took advantage of the fact that the org I was (Portal at Meta) in didn't have very strong product/strategic thinking. So I could drive product changes around things like user error messages, alignment with the Messenger calling infra, etc. (see the case study for a tool I built here)
You can definitely change your archetype, but it's difficult in practice since people come to rely on you in that way.
- 1
a month agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroI dabbled with a bunch of them (I really enjoyed trying out Fixer), but similar to Rahul, I was the closest to Product Hybrid. For product engineers in particular, it is really hard to find Staff scope on the technical side, which is why they need to find scope outside of the raw engineering (like with strongly influencing product direction). I talk about this phenomenon in-depth here: "Between platform (serving developers) and product teams (serving end customers), what should be one's preference based on level?"
