Senior staff engineers excel in operating within environments of uncertainty, making informed decisions amidst incomplete information.
Staff engineers at PagerDuty play a crucial role in providing high leverage by bridging technical gaps and aligning teams towards common goals.
Senior engineers navigate organizational politics by fostering diverse perspectives, promoting collaborative problem-solving, and cultivating a culture of trust and continuous improvement.
Deep dives
The Role of a Staff Engineer at PagerDuty
Staff engineers at PagerDuty play a crucial role in providing high leverage by focusing on essential tasks that bring together various components. These staff engineers do not have a permanent home team but work on high-impact projects across different departments. They focus on high-leverage activities by bridging technical gaps and aligning teams towards common goals.
Bringing People Together Through High Leverage Work
Senior engineers, including staff engineers, often leverage their skills by focusing on work that involves coordinating and aligning different teams. Their ability to synthesize information, identify high-impact opportunities, and bring diverse teams to a common understanding is highlighted as a critical aspect of their role. This 'glue work' is considered high leverage as it enhances team collaboration and efficiency.
Balancing Technical and Managerial Experiences
Senior engineers like Rich Lafer at PagerDuty bring a unique blend of technical expertise and management experience to their roles. Their ability to navigate complex technical challenges while empathizing with managerial concerns allows them to bridge gaps between engineering and other departments effectively. This dual experience provides them with a holistic approach to problem-solving.
Adapting to Uncertainty and Building Resilience
Senior staff engineers excel in operating within environments of uncertainty, making decisions amidst incomplete information. Their focus on adaptive capacity and resilience drives them to approach incidents as learning opportunities, emphasizing the power of narrative in understanding complex systems. Building resilience involves embracing uncertainty and honing the ability to make informed decisions under pressure.
The Mentoring Approach of Senior Engineers
Senior engineers like Rich Lafer engage in mentoring by sharing their experiences and expertise in a hands-on, informal manner. Their mentoring style focuses on practical guidance, experiential learning, and collaborative problem-solving. By providing real-world insights and opportunities for skill development, they empower mentees to navigate challenging situations and build resilience in their own roles.
Navigating Organizational Politics and Decision-Making
Senior engineers navigate organizational politics by fostering diverse perspectives, encouraging dialogue, and approaching decision-making with transparency. By inclusively involving relevant stakeholders, addressing disagreements constructively, and promoting collaborative problem-solving, they mitigate bias and promote equitable decision-making processes within the organization. Their focus on teamwork and shared learning cultivates a culture of trust and continuous improvement.
Oscillating between the roles of individual contributor and management has been a recurring theme on this show. Our guest today, Rich Lafferty, has some special insights into this pattern that can help anyone looking to improve their work. Rich works as a Staff Site Reliability Engineer at PagerDuty and has spent many years interfacing with various departments and building projects and proposals. In our conversation with Rich, we discuss how his past roles have informed his work at PagerDuty and how he gets the most out of his teams without exploiting the authority that comes with his more senior role. We delve into Rich’s process for building proposals and learn some of his tips and tricks for ensuring the best possible outcome by investing in the foundation and design phase. We also explore the importance of early feedback, why you need to include a diverse group of individuals, and how to gradually grow your feedback group. Tune in as we discuss everything from risk management to high and low context culture, and much more!
