Tanya Reilly - The Staff Engineer’s Path

by Tanya Reilly

Copyright 2022 Tanya Reilly. All rights reserved.

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978-1-098-11873-0

[LSI]

When I wrote The Managers Path in 2016, I had many goals. I wanted to share lessons I had learned growing up as a manager. I wanted to show those who were interested in becoming managers what the job would be like. And I wanted to force a reckoning across the industry that we needed to expect more from our managers, and that the managers we were currently promoting often did not have the right balanced focus of people, process, product, and technical skills to do the job well. In short, I wanted to correct what I saw as a cultural failing in tech: to both take management seriously as a critical role and to discourage it from being the default path for ambitious engineers who want to grow their careers.

I would say that I partially succeeded. Every time someone tells me they read my book and decided not to become a manager, I do a little victory dance. From that perspective, at least some people read my book and realize that this path isnt for them. Unfortunately, the alternative path of career growth for the individual contributor, the staff+ engineering path, has lacked a similar guidebook. This lack has led to many choosing to follow the management path despite knowing they would rather not have the responsibility for larger and larger groups of people, because they cannot see another way forward. This is a great frustration for engineers and managers alike: most managers want to have more strong staff+ engineers in their organizations but dont know how to cultivate them, and many engineers want to stay on that path but see no realistic options beyond going into management.

One of the core challenges of the staff+ engineering path is the unspoken expectation that part of being qualified to be on that path is figuring out how to climb it without much in the way of directions. If you were destined to be a staff+ engineer, conventional wisdom argues, you would figure out how to get there yourself. Needless to say, this is a frustrating and bias-ridden approach to career development. As more and more companies realize the need for staff+ engineers, we as an industry cannot afford to maintain a mysticism about the staff+ engineering career path that ignores the underlying skills that lead to successful technical leaders.