Book Summary: the Staff Engineer’s Path

This is an extreme brief summary based on my takeaway for Tanya Reilly’s The Staff Engineer’s Path. My mental model of the book is summarized in the following graph:

My navigation of the book

Change in Expectation

• You can’t avoid being a leader: if you feel like “someone needs to do something” in a room, that “someone” quite often should be you.
• Your time becomes more expensive, focus on what only you can do.

Yonatan Zunger, distinguished engineer at Twitter, describes the four disciplines that are needed in any job in the world:

• Core technical skills: coding, litigation, producing content, cooking, etc.
• Product management: figuring out what needs to be done and why, and maintaining a narrative about that work.
• Project management: the practicalities of achieving the goal, removing chaos, tracking the tasks, noticing what’s blocked and unblocking things.
• People management: Turning a group of people into a team, building their skills and careers, mentoring, and dealing with their problems.

The more senior you are, regardless of your role, the more you are expected to be able to shift across each of these four kinds of jobs easily and fluidly, and function in all rooms.

Navigate the Expectation

Focus on Impact

• Your ultimate job is to make your organization successful.
• Go straight to the org priority and problem.
• Generate your story and help others see it.

Big Picture Thinking

• Diagnose — vision — strategies (principles) — actions

Project Execution

• Simplify complexities, for example, use pictures.
• Active driving: https://leaddev.com/agile-other-ways-working/avoid-lake. Driving, in other words, can’t be passive: it’s an active, deliberate, mindful role.

Levelling Up

• Empower and grow the team, rather than take over from the team.
• Optimize for maintenance, not creation.

Continuous Growth Path

• Growth mindset, change the framing from “I am not good at X” to “I am not level up yet at X”.
• Invest on what you want to be good at.