Listen to your customers but ignore what they say. “Treat your customers like a kindergarten class. If they’re all asking for a snack they’re hungry but perhaps they really need a nutritious lunch instead.”

My advice as someone working at staff engineer role for 3 different employers remotely and the "let problems accumulate" resonates but different context:

- don't be too proactive in solving issues that signals you are not busy to your employers.

- you are not hired to sit around 9-5, what you ship and how it impacts the business bottom line is far more important.

Especially true when I have to juggle 3 different employers. I will be in a long standup meeting with company A while I am answering slack messages from company B or company C has a deadline that overlaps with another and I'd have to work on at the same time.

Previously without LLMs this was very difficult but now its manageable, especially with openclaw and hermes doing a lot of lifting. This let me discover a lot of what's discussed in the article naturally.

I have a different problem: I can find all the problems, but I can't solve them, because they aren't within my control. The people whose control they are within aren't interested in solving them (or letting others work on them). The political and psychological games required to get people to just let you solve problems seems like a second job.

If you spent your whole career inside one corporate ecosystem...do not confuse your rank in that hierarchy, with your rank in the profession. By looking at the some comments here, many are doing that.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FXPh2_BAZD8

“The shape” — smells like tokens. Each paragraph is too perfect.

Eh, I'm not going to say this is wrong, but pretty much like all advice, it's kinda cheap without data. Like Dale Carnegie may be very famous and have a book and say "Use people's names all the times and your conversations will be great" but who actually knows if that makes a difference without some controlled outside study.

I see a lot of people really eager to tell other people how to staff, but a lot of them sure do seem to disagree, and most people I know get to staff anyways without any particular skill after a certain age (title inflation?) including myself.

My smell test for an engineer is -- are they trying to quantify the size of everything in terms of impact, or are they just reacting to whatever customer knocks on their door?

The biggest problem of a sTaFF eNGInEeR can be solved right away: stop writing about this crap. All of these titles are so meaningless where one organization's staff is another's junior is another's CEO, it doesn't matter because all of the organizational insanity that lead you to your coveted title means jack anywhere else. I should write a big ol' think piece from my perspective as a Senior Staff Distinguished Principal! I will get lots of clicks.

There’s literally no difference between writing about being a staff engineer versus someone writing about being a janitor. Honestly I’d rather read about the janitor, they actually make a measureable difference.

It's pathetic how hard people hold on to titles. What have you -done-? How much have you added to the bottom line?

TL;DR is that its extremely hard to show staff level expertise if you work at a wrong company. And the amount of companies that still need this expertise is ever decreasing (big corpos with a lot of autonomy)

This is the real reason why we dont see natural path for more ppl to progress towards Staff level.

Interestingly noone talks about this. “Be first or bust”