Transition to staff engineer requires surpassing senior engineer expectations and showcasing exceptional performance.
Open source involvement offers valuable insights into product improvement and alignment with user needs.
Deep dives
Definition of Expectations for Staff Engineer Role
Being a staff engineer involves meeting certain benchmarks and expectations to reach a promotion. These expectations are a combination of attributes demonstrated over time and a manager's assessment of those attributes. The promotion process requires demonstrating effectiveness in areas like mentoring, project management, and showcasing recent impactful work.
Distinction Between Senior and Staff Engineers
The transition from a senior to a staff engineer involves going beyond typical responsibilities like mentorship, code reviews, and project leadership. Staff engineers are expected to excel in these areas and show effectiveness in work that extends beyond coding tasks. Moving into staff roles often requires surpassing the expectations set for senior engineers and showcasing exceptional performance.
Project Leadership for Staff Promotion
Challenging projects that lead to promotion involve impactful initiatives that solve crucial issues. For example, splitting responsibilities in a monolith at GitHub required a strategic approach to ownership assignment and code management. Initiatives like creating 'service owners' to streamline code management reflect the depth and impact of projects that contribute to staff engineer promotions.
Importance of Open Source Experience in Staff Engineer Role
Open source involvement influences the day-to-day work of staff engineers, offering insights into product improvement and technical decisions. Engineers engaged in open source projects like GitHup gain valuable perspectives on user feedback and product usability. Collaborative discussions within the organization benefit from engineers' open source experiences, leading to product enhancements and alignment with user needs.
Today we have a great guest to talk about his transition to, and current role as, a staff engineer: Mike McQuaid from GitHub! Mike is also a project leader at Homebrew, and brings a wealth of expertise and experience to the table, as well as the obvious added perspective that any engineer from the GitHub team would have. In our conversation, we get into a bit of Mike's journey up until now, the period of stepping up into the position of staff engineer, and how his time spent with open-source projects has influenced his other work. Mike gives us a good rundown of the different levels of leadership that exist at GitHub as well as painting a picture of the way he prefers to oversee engineers and projects. We talk about the healthiest ways to prioritize and tackle work and get into the sometimes murky waters of impact and value measurement. We ask Mike about what it is like working at GitHub where the people building things are also the ones using them, before discussing some thoughts on mentoring and sponsoring, OKRs, and the resources that have been most useful to Mike along the way. Tune in with us today to hear it all!