How to level up as a Software Engineer despite having setbacks? - Part II (Sr. to Staff Eng)
Senior to Staff Engineer is quite a move!
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I am Gourav. I write about Engineering, Productivity, Thought Leadership, and the Mysteries of the mind!
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How to get promoted from Senior to Staff Engineer despite having setbacks?
2 Must-read Books you when targeting Staff Engineer Level
How to get promoted from Senior to Staff Engineer despite having setbacks?
This is the second part of the multi-part series to help you level up or get promoted to the next level.
In the previous edition, we covered the journey from a Newbie Geek, all the way up to a Senior Software Engineer. Today, I am going to talk about going from Senior to Staff Software Engineer.
As before, I would like you to revisit some disclaimers. I am going to provide you multiple crisp action items to succeed even if you mess up occasionally.
With that in place, let’s get started.
Senior → Staff Software Engineer
Experience years: 7-15 (lower experience promotions are rare; the more senior the better)
Current titles: SDE3, Senior Software Engineer, Senior Software Engineer II
Target Titles: Staff (Software) Engineer, Staff Tech-Lead, Architect, Staff Lead
Scope: Cross-team or Cross-organizational: Projects, Leadership, Technical and People skills, Strong Business Intuition.
A special context section:
Senior-to-staff promotions are not usual, often, or expected. That is why I want to provide some quick contextual points before proceeding to action items:
Promotion to Staff or getting hired at that level is very difficult and not every senior engineer is expected to reach that level. You won’t be penalized for staying at Senior for 20 years. In many organizations, Senior is the terminal level.
The promotion process, role guidelines, archetypes at the Staff level as well as the role of a manager having a Staff level report is diverse and quite ambiguous.
If your team has multiple staff engineers, it is a red flag. It means either there is a title inflation or the bar is low, which sets you up for failure when it comes to industry standards.
After the senior level, you also have the choice to pursue a managerial path as well.
Staff is not just a better senior engineer. It encompasses tech and people leadership as well as a strong sense of responsibility.
Assuming you want to pursue this path, let’s dive now into actionable stuff.
Action Items
Action items include doing everything that you have done at the Senior level, plus:
Identifying your Staff Project and executing it ‘nicely’
A Staff Project is a nice combination of:
solving a problem that has a cross-team impact
a constant pain point for stakeholders (customers, developers, company)
has the highest or near high probability of getting funded/resourced and prioritized.
Executing nicely includes:
building a really simple, cost-effective, elegant, and low-operation-intensive solution
showcasing leadership via motivation, clear communication, and force multiplication (delegating stuff to empower others to grow).
Pick a problematic area (non-project), convert it into a charter and lead.
Does your company lack extendable APIs? Are you spending too much on cloud-provider costs? Does deployment suck? Is the hiring or promotion process broken? Are critical incidents and pages increasing day by day? - you got the idea.
Understand the root cause and create a low burden/cost/maintenance (possibly automated) campaign or process to detect such things and make course corrections.
Bring people together as you progress because you are onto something that affects the masses. Their opinions matter!
Become the go-to-person for that.
Solve your existing leaders’ problems:
A key part of becoming a Staff is taking more responsibility and making it easy for other leaders.
I covered a lot in an existing edition on responsibility, trust, and how to attain that as A Secret to becoming a Staff+ engineer.
Find a mentor and a sponsor
A Mentor is one who constantly guides you towards your goals. This should be someone who knows the quirks of the promotion process or may have gone through the process recently.
A Sponsor brings visibility to your work by mentioning and sharing your work in wide groups. This should ideally be someone with very high credibility in the company.
They could be the same person but it’s better to have those as two separate humans so that your mentor is not considered biased.
Be visible consistently in many different slack channels. That includes:
the incidents, on-call support, customer escalations
infrastructure breaks
incident postmortems
helping others
recurring issues.
Speak ‘Right’ and ‘Appropriate’ with ‘Confidence’.
Mentor multiple folks, and help others grow.
Build a strong culture, and be humble, inclusive, and helpful.
Navigate through complexity, and get stuff done simply.
Acceptable setbacks and how to learn and overcome those
Scope Creep
Setback: Project scope expanding beyond initial plans.
Overcome: Reassess project scope, communicate changes to stakeholders, and establish clear boundaries.
Resource Allocation
Setback: Mismanagement of resources.
Overcome: Evaluate resource needs, reallocate if possible, and communicate with team members about any adjustments.
2 Must-read Books you when targeting Staff Engineer Level
In case you missed my previous articles…
Secret to become a Staff+ Engineer swiftly
The Secluded Mindset for Becoming an Elite Leader from an Everyday Engineer
How to remove political roadblocks to grab your well-deserved promotion?
Access the full archive here.
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