Secret to become a Staff+ Engineer swiftly
Unveiling the Leadership Blueprint
👋 Hey there, fellow tech enthusiasts, professionals, and wanderers of the digital realm! 🚀
I am Gourav. I write about Engineering, Productivity, Thought Leadership, and the Mysteries of the mind!
Today, I am going to walk you through a secret to navigate to the Staff+ leadership roles and actionable insights to get you there by doing stuff beyond your regular responsibilities. I am also sharing 30 money and wealth lessons that I learned in my journey so far..
Today at a Glance
What’s the secret to navigating swiftly into a Staff+ Engineering role?
2 Fun-facts
30 Money & Wealth Lessons from My Tech Journey
Inspiration for the day
How to navigate Swiftly into a Staff+ Software Engineering role?
Promotions at junior or even somewhat senior levels are mostly tied to your inputs, output aka impact, as well as tenure and technical expertise.
Staff+ Engineering roles are beyond this.
Before we talk about how to navigate timely enough to this level, it’s important to understand what we are throwing ourselves into, because that will answer the part of the equation automatically.
Let’s break it down first. What is a Staff+ Engineering role? What do they do?
At big tech and mid-tier companies, Staff+ engineer means Staff or Principal Engineer or Tech Lead and they form the top 1-2% of the engineering IC population. At startup, the role is matchable to a CTO or a Founding Engineer hired at number 1-5.
So, by now, it should be pretty clear that it’s a Software Engineering Leadership role rather than just a Software Engineering role….Right?
Wait a second, you have heard this line numerous times, what’s exactly does it mean to say it’s a leadership role? What does it cater to? Is it the same as being a manager?
Today, let’s just understand this in the easiest way possible from a real-life example so that you never have to fall trap of ambiguity of this role ever again.
You may have heard this line - as you grow in your life, you start to become friends with your parents (assuming you have a healthy relationship with them, otherwise think of your guardian).
You start sharing their burden, start understanding their situation, and help them in different problematic areas like saving or growing money, expanding their business, or just helping them emotionally.
If you are doing that, there you go…..you are becoming a leader, unconsciously. That’s the secret that you rarely hear.
That also answers indirectly in terms of what these folks do. Beyond what a Senior Engineer does:
They become leaders by helping existing leaders by taking ambiguous, open-ended & complicated stuff off their plate.
They are right most of the time due to their wide experience and are trusted well and thus have a great influence among seniors, peers, and juniors.
They set the technical vision for multiple teams, or the entire organization if it’s a small to mid-sized company.
They influence business and cost decisions.
So, what do you need to do to fast-track your way to Staff+ Engineer?
Firstly, you better plan for this from early on in your software journey, ideally, when you are a mid-senior engineer. But if you missed that boat, that’s okay.
Among thousands of things that you can or should do, let me today focus on one meaty piece.
And that is to peer up with your manager, other Staff+ Engineers, and the Managerial chain and gain their trust by helping them out.
In my experience, not doing this is the single biggest promotion roadblock to these leadership levels.
Just to be clear, there are numerous other reasons why you may not get promoted to Staff+, for example: if there is no need for the role in the organization, existing leadership sucks, there is no budget to fund their salary, and last but not the least, if you are not putting in 100% efforts.
So, here is some actionable stuff that you should start doing from TODAY if you are serious about growing into these levels:
Pick impactful projects as that’s a prerequisite. This is because you still need to be operating at your current level. But being a contributor or DRI isn’t enough. The project should be cross-cutting, ideally positively impacting multiple teams and customers, and have a scope of influential problem-solving.
Talk to your manager and the skip level, and try to understand what are their current problematic areas or where are they struggling in their growth path. Remember, their growth with your help is equivalent to your guaranteed growth due to a mutual or win-win situation.
Be humble with your peers and juniors, and work hard and smart in complex situations like Incident Management - solving customer pain tickets and support requests.
Conduct powerful collaborative sessions with different stakeholders and support and power them to do their work. Stakeholders may include, product managers, Infrastructure teams, customers, etc.
Partner with Engineering managers, Directors, VPs, and not just your own manager, to talk through different issues popping up in the organization like hiring, operations, and morale, and propose actionable solutions. Go with solutions in mind and not just problems.
Your own manager is your top mentor, ally, partner as well as your sponsor. Maintain a healthy relationship with them. A Staff+ Engineer is often a peer or senior to an Engineering manager. The important common denominator between them is that they both are Leaders. So, a manager would only promote you if they truly find you as their partner.
Finally, if you know you are talented enough, meaning you got that feedback from other Principal Engineers or staff+ community but still not getting promoted, probably due to politics or spoiled culture, it’s time to look for opportunities outside.
30 Money & Wealth Lessons from my tech journey
Everyone has a different relationship with money. Do you know why?
It’s by design.
Because No Two DNA’s genetic codes are the same, human behaviors differ, leading to varied thought processes around happiness, pleasures, and fulfilment.
As money is often falsely thought of as a way to tap into Happiness modes, human nature leads to a plethora of opportunities to spend, save, invest, gamble, or lose money.
Here, I am sharing 30 lessons that I learned in my life ‘based on my understanding’ and relationship with money:
Money != Wealth.
Money is a mode of transaction, Wealth is about freedom and the mechanism to generate money while you are sleeping. (Thanks to Naval Ravikant
for this foundational teaching!).Even millions of dollars won’t make you wealthy. True wealth = Health + Financial Freedom + Relationships + Connection with Higher consciousness.
Financial freedom is when you don’t “need” to work. Rather, you might focus on what you always “wanted” to work on.
One blunder mistake in life could reverse your financial freedom but if you have an auto-pilot of wealth creation set-up, you may always start from scratch.
A salary wouldn’t make you wealthy. You need to build something that adds value to others’ lives to start the autopilot of money-making.
Even though salary won’t make you rich, you should still work at a Job for some time to build a financial safety net and get experience of how businesses work.
Tech and Coding jobs are some of the best for high band salaries.
Sharing Tech knowledge won’t make you less dependable, rather it increases your worth in the industry, opening up a lot of wealth-making opportunities.
Every Engineer or Manager should write to share knowledge or valuable content - wealth would follow automatically. Doing the reverse won’t help.
In this modern age of the Internet, software systems leverage is bigger than any other leverage to increase your sales.
96% of folks miss out on maxing out 401k, employee match, or backdoor Roth and fail to secure or save thousands of money in compounding.
Compounding is great, but not the fastest way to get financial freedom. This is for your retirement. Who knows if we will live till then.
To become wealthy fast, you need to invent something or build a business.
Your values, skills, habits, and attitude towards learning could either make you or break you.
Starting to build on AI and LLMs might be a great technology for a startup. But don’t start a startup focused on tech, rather start it to solve a problem. Tech choices are tools.
Don’t fall for ‘guaranteed money-making side-hustles’ click baits. There is no “get rich quick side hustle”. In fact, the term 'side hustle' is quite misleading, giving the impression that minimal effort suffices.
Don’t leave your Tech Job without having another job offer or established safe funds for your startup and 12 months of emergency funds.
Investing in startups as an angel investor is the second best option if you don’t have an idea to solve for others.
66% of investors make emotional or impulsive investing decisions. This is more common for Gen Zers (85%) and millennials (73%) than Gen Xers (60%) and baby boomers (54%). 32% of investors have traded while drunk.
At the casino, the house almost always wins.
In Equity, a person who knows about fundamental and technical analysis and all tactics might end up losing more than a regular retail investor doing index investing.
Index fun Investing is low-cost and straightforward, but remember, nothing is free.
It’s still better to pay a marginal fee to an expert managing money for you than you lose more than that by making bad decisions.
Property investment is beneficial long term when it’s done in a commercial space having constant need. Warehouses are common examples.
Gold is still a good diversification option.
99.99% of crypto tokens are pump-and-dump schemes.
If you want to buy expensive cars or gadgets, try not to buy them to impress others but for your genuine use or comfort.
At the end of the day, you know how much money you have in the bank, but not how much time you are left with.
Even after having loads of money and wealth, there is no guarantee you will be happy. Happiness is a state of mind.
2 Fun-facts
The first hard disk drive was created by IBM in 1956. It was the size of a refrigerator and could store 5 MB of data.
Source: https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=952
You may be fluent in Javascript or Python, but NASA still operates some projects on programming from the 1970’s.
Books I am reading…
These are the two books I am reading:
Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell
Hello, Startup: A Programmer's Guide to Building Products, Technologies, and Teams
What’s on your mind? Please share any interesting books that you’ve read in the past. Feel free to reply to this email!
In case you missed my previous articles…
How earth's rotation caused Software Systems to go down?
Why did I start this newsletter?
Why do we fall short Despite Intelligence and Skill Excellence?
The Art of Empowering Others with Influential Leadership: Spreading Joy and Happiness
Dispelling Career Advice Myths in the Tech World
How to apply Bhagavad Gita teachings to succeed at Work (without Stress)?
Your thoughts matter! Comment or reply with your post ideas—I'm all ears and ready to turn your concepts into content! 🙋♀️🙋♂️
I am not the only one!
So many other leaders have been pretty successful in sharing their learnings via their writings. Some of these folks are partly the reasons why I started my newsletter.
John CrickettAuthor of Coding Challenges
Jordan CutlerAuthor of High Growth Engineer
Omar Halabieh Author of Leadership in 60 Seconds
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Best regards,
Gourav Khanijoe