My experience of speaking to people who make the decisions is that titles are absolutely a social signal that gets people to listen. Now, if what you say is too whacky, or you demonstrate a total lack of ability once given a chance, then you’ll lose that listening privilege. However, a more senior title can get people’s ears opened in the first place.
One could argue that if you work in a place where people only start listening to you if you have the right title, that place might not have the best culture to begin with.
Instead of trying to climb those ranks, it might perhaps make more sense to look for a place where your input is valued based on its own merit and not based on what label is attached to your active directory entry.
Lots of places don’t have the best culture, you work with what you’ve got in life.
You might be applying for a job and, since they have limited other information, your existing job title is used as signal to figure out if what you’re saying has merit. Particularly if what you’re saying doesn’t mesh with their own experience or expectations.
> One could argue that if you work in a place where people only start listening to you if you have the right title, that place might not have the best culture to begin with.
There isn't a single place where status (and by extension titles showing that status) wouldn't change how people communicate and how open they are to your ideas.
If you think you're in a place that doesn't do that, you're either deliberately closing your eyes to it, are the privileged high status person (and closing your eyes to it) or you don't understand how human relations work.
Even in places where "your own merit" counts, there's a big status gradient between which ideas get listened to. If you don't have titles encoding that status gradient, you just have informal authority structure which does the same.
Of course it's unrealistic to expect that the status gradient simply shouldn't matter. It's perfectly natural (and useful, healthy) to weigh what people say according to their status, to some degree. It's just human relations, as you say.
Where things become problematic is when their putative status becomes the primary or overriding factor. That is, "X is true (simply) because Y said so" environments. Or "You're just an L{N}, but I'm a L{N+k} so even though I don't actually know what I'm talking about, I don't have to listen to you" environments.
What is the value of credibility under this way of thinking? If someone has a history of delivering but you think their idea is bad, do you give them a chance? Or vice versa, if someone has great vision and a history of failing, do you give them a chance?
Is there no weight to credibility? Similarly, if Terry Tao refuses to even read your ideas unless you have the right professional look, is that cruelly dismissive and arrogant?
FWIW, those places are (hopefully) not at your company... it is like, you are at a conference or trying to get meetings with people from other companies.
I worked at a place with great culture, where everyone on a team would have a say on decisions or could start and drive new initiatives that would get an ear from the team, TO A FAULT, and still people would turn around and ask for the promotion. At times this would be for money, but at times where it wasn't, I guess it was for the status. Maybe, now I think about it, it may not be for the status within the organization in question, but rather for the status with friends or, you know, on LinkedIn!
In one of my work experiences, "titles" were used as opposed to (or with a meager) paycheck raises. The most ridiculous aspect was that we had a fair number of group leaders, each with a team of 1 (just themselves).
exactly this. i’m senior staff at my current company and I could very much envision if i moved to california i would on average be considered a senior at most conpanies.
When I was in the Marines, I was promoted to Lance Corporal twice (and wasn't demoted between the two promotions.) The unit I was in just wasn't that great with Admin.
> That means your manager has to be switched on and fully on board.
Your manager also needs enough political capital to drive the promotion. This is something I have an acute awareness of, having been told for the last 3 years that I was operating at the principal level (no staff title here) but not getting promoted. Eventually my manager was forced out of the company by bullying from my skip-level, so now I'm left to look for a new role elsewhere or spend some unknown amount of time building the relationship with my new manager.
My title in the company is Principal, but my role encompasses a bit more. I recently helped and advocated for a promotion to Principal for one of my reports. The step from Senior to Principal is a very challenging one in our organization, as it’s not based on skill alone but also on other factors. In our organization, there is a strong focus on leveling and mentoring, and we set clear expectations that reaching the Principal level (which is the highest IC level for us) is a long journey.
Just to be clear, I got promoted when the rules and definitions weren’t as clearly defined. That doesn’t mean I’m undeserving of the title, but it does highlight how, even within the same organization, the criteria for who can hold certain titles and receive promotions have evolved over time. Because of this, I feel the experience described here can seem somewhat arbitrary given the way most companies have no shared setup / structure for promotions and skill levels. Congratulations on the promotion non the less.
> When I went up to staff at GitHub, it helped that I had been the kernel of a small APAC-based engineering team
This is giving me major white savior vibes, as in management didn't want to talk to those foreginers who acted and spoke English funny, so he became the Western face of the team, and took all the credit. All of which is sadly a thing.
>This is giving me major white savior vibes, as in management didn't want to talk to those foreginers who acted and spoke English funny, so he became the Western face of the team, and took all the credit.
Heaven forbid that a good communicator get promoted to deal with people, or that people be proficient in the language of the land. The promotion couldn't have been because of seniority, clear communication, or high competence. No, there's no possible explanation besides racism and xenophobia.
>All of which is sadly a thing.
There are at least as many places that refuse to promote white people because of the possibility that it might be seen this way. There's nothing inherently wrong with having a white manager. Managers often appear to get more credit than their subordinates, for better or worse. The combination of a US native worker (who can stay here forever by the way) plus management does not add up to racism.
Corollary: This role can also be filled by someone of Asian heritage who was raised in the US, and who speaks English very well, as well as some Asian language proficiently.
- That still doesn't address the core issue which isn't inherently racial. It's that if you come from a certain part of the world, there's an effective glass ceiling for you and all of your achievements and hard work has to go through a Western person, whose only attribute is being more palatable to Western tastes. Not hard work, not technical expertise, not spending sleepless nights getting the blocker bugs fixed so that the product can ship on time. What do you think that does to morale? And is it morally right to run a company this way?
- A person named Sean Goedecke probably isn't that person anyways.
If you go to China or India and work there you can see it now. I doubt the whole phenomenon in question is real in the US, but I do believe that you would see this kind of crap in Asia.
Everything the article describes just feels so arbitrary, almost cargo cultish. You get a pay raise if you're visible and you make the company money? That does make sense, why the job title dances? Why couldn't the author just write an article about how to be a good, impactful developer? Why did it have to be "how to go from $meaningless_job_title to $meaningless_job_title2"?
> Staff promotions only happen at a company that has staff roles
Does this mean that the companies who don't have staff roles are fundamentally incapable of delivering software of the same quality as the ones who do? Doesn't this actually show how arbitrary job titles are?
> > Staff promotions only happen at a company that has staff roles
It’s also not true? I was the first “Staff” engineer at my previous company. I think it was just a retention tactic since I was somewhat important to a few major projects at the time. Now I’m a Sr Engineer with less responsibility again and I love it
I don't agree with the mentoring and leading part not being important except as a mediator to shipping. Mentoring and leading increases your soft power by giving people the opportunity to like you. This power can translate even to the next company since tech can be a small world.
Want to second that, not getting people an opportunity to like you can turn you into that person at the top who’s disconnected from line engineers work - and people won’t trust you enough to tell you when you’re making a mistake. Guess how I learnt that :)
Highly situational. Influencing 10 junior-mid engineers is always worse than being in good graces of someone that actually has influence on your career (manager, director, etc.)
I still have a hard time saying which way in your scenario since I tend to move companies. The wide network has totally helped my career. Also I feel like at a higher level, having a network is actually part of the job.
In the same way that being a CEO means having a broad network of connections even before day 0 of the job.
All the comments here so far ( 4 hours since this post went up) are very disappointing. They have so far:
1. Insulted the company the person has worked for (Irrelevant to the post)
2. Insulted the titles as meaningless (Irrelevant to the post)
3. Talked about Job scope (Irrelevant to the post)
4. Demeaned the promotion (Sour grapes and just nasty)
Now, i get that promotions in corporate environments are always a nasty business - unfair, political, skewed and arbitrary. It doesnt always go to the most deserving.
What this post has done (at least in my experience in the corporate world) is shown how the sausage is made. It is not pretty and a lot of the post dwells on "buy-in", "sponsorship", "relationships", etc because this is how the game is played. I have personally seen it played by both technically competent and technically incompetent people for senior technical roles.
I wish the comments would focus on the contents of the article rather than sounding like a bunch of people tired of corporate shenanigans. I mean, we all are tired of corporate bullshit when it comes to promotion. At a certain point, i decided to stop playing it and decided i am going to effectively "plateau" at that level. But, that gave me leverage i didnt have before which is that i no longer that to do anything i didnt want to do - skip-level ass-kissing, show-boating, etc, etc.
To all aspirants who wish to climb the corporate ladder and reap the benefits (financial, better job prospects, ability to work internationally at higher levels of seniority, better mating chances, better access to higher quality of life services, etc while trading off your time, stress and likely your physical and mental health), this post has solid advice.
The staff title unlocks a new level of self-aggrandizement which is on display here and in certain published books.
As for professional qualities, I don’t think there is one. It takes a staff engineer at FAANG to do what a senior can do at a smaller company, because of all the other self—important people not listening to you. (Dealing with that is a skill though, so having that skill might be it.)
The GP is saying that FAANG companies need staff engineers to navigate the politics enough to achieve the same level of productivity as a senior engineer in a small company.
i don’t see why the size of the company one works for has to be correlated with an engineer’s skill level. i’ve seen some of the best programmers i ever met cone out of 10 years working at a small company because it happened to be closer to his kid’s school route.
I'm sure there are exceptions (and it's way more likely that the very top are in FANGs, maybe the distinguished engineers making millions per year?) but I was never particularly impressed with the level of skills of average FANGs people.
The difference in compensation between NBA and local games is millions to nothing - between FANGs and other company there is a much smaller factor and there are way more perks in some small companies than in FANGs: less politics, no PIPs, remote, low tax / low cost of living locations, no 6m to prepare for an interview, riskier equities (if that's your thing), CTO path, etc.
All my FANGs friends ended up in smaller companies after having marked their CV as ex-Apple or ex-Google.
If I were younger and I was earning less and happy to sacrifice quality of life to live in some big city, I would spend the 6m prep-time and leetcode, just to have the FANG name on my CV and charge more to other businesses later on.
Have you ever heard the expression "the exception that proves the rule"?
Also I love how you think the Linux kernel is valuable because Linus started it and not because millions of hours have been invested in it by other engineers (most of whom are employed by big corps).
You've missed the point. OP is discussing affordance, not skill. A senior engineer at a smaller company may have equal or less skill than a staff engineer at a larger company, but they have more affordance if there are less cogs in the bureaucratic machine that need oiling whenever they need to get something done. Experience in a variety of workplaces will give you the same intuition.
Nothing. The manager reads the Phsycology of the engineer and gives them whatever title which makes them happy. Since vast majority of humans find meaning and purposes in random words this works.(Starts with identification with their own randomly assigned name when they were born). A better measurement of significance would be the amount of money one get paid. That has more correlation with reality than random titles.
For example a mid experienced engineer at Nvidia is doing better than a staff engineer at a random tech company because of their millions of dollars gains in Nvidia stocks.
Now you can write all day about being a "staff engineer" in LinkedIn or blog posts and how that is such a big deal blah blah blah. But all that is spam when we measure it with reality (your bank account).
In my experience, staff engineer is an an alternate role to software architect - some companies have the former, others the latter. When doing something that requires serious design work, an architect typically does it by drawing diagrams, sitting in meetings, writing docs, but not doing coding that much. Staff engineers tend to be more coding and technically focused, they bootstrap features by designing and coding the skeleton and coordinate the work of oter engineers in building out the feature.
It's a much more natural career path for people with a coding background but some companies, particularly enterprisey ones with lots of bureaucracy, prefer architects.
Scope of influence. A senior should be defining and building things within their team. A staff engineer or a principal should be influencing things more broadly than their team.
Correct. The old not what you know but who you know. Unless you've developed that influence and lived the role then most don't understand what it entails. Getting things done at a massive company can be very hard.
I guess a senior engineer might be "linked" to a single kind of tasks (backend, frontend etc) while a staff engineer has knowledge in a lot of domains and can be the "bridge" for projects that need people from many different teams
This is a trick question, because the only correct answer is "it depends".
The definitions are arbitrary and vary - sometimes wildly or completely opposite - from company to company and industry to industry. Some companies don't use titles at all and use levels - which are also arbitrary and differ accordingly.
If you never leave the incestuous Silicon Valley bubble, however, you may never learn this.
This is so full of office politics that I'm glad I'm working at a place without it.
One tell-tale sign is that the article talks as much about which important contributions "won't get you there" as about which will. Including acknowledging that it's all important! Let all those dumb folks do all that other important stuff, focus selfishly on the hype-of-the-day topics so you can bag that sweet promotion. Relying on that there are many other folks that do the boring and less sexy stuff that keeps the light on. And which is ultimately necessary to lift you into your sweet promotion. Just that you want the credit, not those other folks. I'd be deeply resentful of somebody doing this ego-trip, and therefore, again, I'm glad my place doesn't have this divisive nonsense.
I also was staff and senior staff when I held a salary position. To me these are basically bullshit titles created because companies have to keep on promoting people.
It depends on the company. At Sun there were very few senior staff level seats and staff was very hard to get as they required management to really advocate for you. Other companies have a technical ceiling for senior principal but there are absolute gazillions of them.
The article describes insight on how to gain leverage. Regardless of promotion plans, it's good to have leverage in the current economy so your career doesn’t end prematurely when the company goes to cost-saving mode.
> If you’re just looking to get the staff role, it’s almost always easier to get hired into it than promoted to it
I think this a big contributor to gendered wage gaps
So many people I’ve talked to are worried about how they come across to colleagues in their current organization and are worried about glass ceilings there
While the competition is absolutely coming across as too cocky and too abrasive, but continues interviewing at different companies until it hits, not worried about any ceiling or “terminal titles” at the current organization
If people are playing completely different games, the outcome cant really be compared
Tl;dr you have to be grifter-grinder and disregard all the “important” bullshit of mentoring, interviewing, training as only shipping will give you a slight chance of promotion.
My point is that if you want every single thing you do at work to be the bare minimum to get promoted then you are welcome to do that. Others don't necessarily feel that way.
And those people get promoted entirely of the luck of having a decent manager. Everyone else who has a mediocre manager will end up spinning their wheels and wondering why they're not getting promoted.
I went from eng, to sr eng, to principal eng, back to eng, making more money each time along the way across different orgs.
Our industry has little to no real standards. Congrats on your promotion, but your title ultimately means little across companies.