What's the Difference Between A Senior And Staff Engineer?

The mark of someone who is NOT ready to be a staff engineer: Asking what needs to happen to get to staff.

A staff engineer should identify problems worth solving, and then get buy-in across the org to solve the problem.

• Despite each staff engineer's journey being different, there's still an opportunity to learn from the examples of other promotion cases. Here's an example from Rachel's days at Yelp with a talented staff engineer:
  • Google announced an algorithm change for SEO ranking, which would favor websites with better mobile friendliness.
  • An engineer on a feature team recognized that this would hurt Yelp and brought it up very proactively.
  • They drove a proposal and broke down the problem with several domain experts in the organization.
  • It took a while, but they were able to ship a quality, long-term solution.
• Instead of just looking at "what" new problem to solve, there's also opportunity for very senior engineers to breakdown the "how" to accomplish a large, ambiguous problem and get to staff.

If you enjoyed this video, you can watch all of Rachel's other Taro videos here: https://www.jointaro.com/topic/rachel-zhao/

For more resources on getting to staff:

• "How can I come up with big initiatives, especially those at a Staff level?"
• "For a Staff engineer at a Big Tech company, what should their first 3-6 months look like?"
• "How do I come up with innovative, impactful ideas and bring them to my team?"