Staff Engineer Career Development Videos, Forum, and Q&A

Finding a mentor requires effort and patience. It’s about building relationships based on trust, respect, and mutual benefit. By actively seeking out mentors and demonstrating your commitment to growth, you can gain invaluable guidance and support as you navigate your career path. How to find the best people who would like to be mentored and people who are mentors?

I'm originally from India. I started working in the US from 2021. My team in the Bay Area is pretty talented and I have been learning a lot from them. I am considering if I should move back to India at some point down the line. I'm worried about the career opportunities in India though. Given most companies have their headquarters here, Bay Area has plenty of L5, L6, L7 engineers tackling massive scope. Does India also have many Staff+ engineering roles dealing with massive projects? Or are the opportunities in India mostly restricted to L3-L5 levels?

I've been interviewing. I interviewed well with one company, and the company was ready to give me an offer. I told them I was in various stages of interviewing with other companies and would like to decide by 11/26. The recruiter asked me how I would decide. I named some criteria regarding developer tooling/mentoring/on-call. And I also mentioned I would compare numbers if I had other offers. The recruiter also mentioned they would like me to decide so that they know whether to move forward with other candidates in the pipeline, and she would talk with the hiring manager to see if they needed to move faster. She scheduled an additional call with a principal engineer on the topic of dealing with tech debt on Thursday but never got back to me about what the hiring manager said. This company is high on my list except for possibly one other company I am wrapping up interviews with tomorrow, though I have another company with interviews on Monday. If I pass those interviews, they may want another interview to decide the level to offer me (between Senior and Staff). How would you advise me to respond?

How can I enhance my soft skills, particularly in navigating leadership challenges? As someone from India for whom English is not the first language, I aim to transition into a senior or staff-level role. Building rapport with peers and juniors is essential for me, but I'm unsure how to foster personal relationships in the workplace. Are there any recommended books on this topic?

I would like to ask for advice on a habit of mine. I tend to ask a lot of questions before starting a task or problem, and this has had a positive impact on my work—helping with timely deliveries, promotions, and overall efficiency. However, as I progress in my career, I’ve started to feel that this behavior is not fully satisfying me. The actual issue arises when I interact with distinguished engineers or principal engineers. I often compile a long list of queries, and while they are usually patient and responsive, I’ve noticed that they sometimes point out that my questions have already been answered in comments or complex discussions. Upon rechecking, I realize that the answers were indeed there, but I hadn’t noticed them before asking. My main weakness is that I don’t like reading documentation, lengthy tickets, or going through hundreds of Jira comments to find answers that have already been provided. How should I handle this situation? On one hand, I receive appreciation from directors for asking questions rather than making assumptions, as it helps me deliver better results. But on the other hand, I feel dissatisfied and want to improve in this area. Additionally, I struggle with reading extensive documentation, whether it’s technical docs, research papers, or language references. I tend to avoid them due to laziness. How can I develop the discipline and efficiency to go through necessary documentation without losing productivity? I would appreciate advice on both of these challenges.

I know this is a broad question and depends on personal choices. I'm wondering if you could provide some insights on choosing between IC and manager paths.
What are the factors to look into?
How fast or difficult is career growth in both the paths?
How do the work-life balance and day-to-day life look like in both these paths?
My eventual goal is to start a startup. Does having managerial experience help here or being strong senior/staff IC help here better?

In your experience, what methods worked best to motivate engineers that don't report to you or work on a daily basis? As a Staff engineer, I need to advocate and motivate engineers in my span to adopt new tools or processes. The main challenge is around building rapport with the remote team that are mostly new hires or I didn't interact a whole lot earlier. While this questions, majorly sounds how to influence without authority. I am looking for more concrete steps for a quick win while I work on the culture part as a whole.

1. What can I do to best support you as your manager?
2. What should I do more or less as your manager?
3. What do you like most about our team?
4. What are opportunities for the team to do better?
5. What motivates/demotivates you?
6. What do you think the best way of recognizing people is?
7. What do you think the best way of recognizing people is?
8. Experience: What development opportunities will you pursue in your day-to-day role?

• E.g. Deliver on project ...
• E.g. Practice writing a technical spec
• E.g. Present a topic at Town Hall

1. Exposure:  How will you learn from those around you?

• (This can be from within your team or outside of your team such as mentors)
• E.g. Meet and collaborate with ....
• E.g. Read technical spec from a mentor.. Education: What structured or formal learning will you take?
• E.g. Take a bootcamp class on Java
• E.g. Take a machine learning bootcamp What do you want to achieve? What is your developmental goal? What skills will help you be a tech lead? How do you want to improve collaboration / communication skills ? What is the expectation at the next level? What technologies are you interested in? What product areas are you interested in? What resources, support or training can help you get there? What can your manager do to help? When do you plan to complete this goal? What objective measures will indicate that you achieved your goal? What will be the benefits of this change for you? What are your long term ambitions (3 years)?
• e.g. Get promoted to next level What are your career goals by the end of this year (1 year)?
• e.g. Be a subject matter expert in some domain areas
• e.g. a specific performance rating

My team spends a good amount of time fixing random/recurring low priority crashes. The goal is to keep the overall crash rate under our agreed SLA. Crash rate naturally goes up over time, so we need to continually invest time plugging up these crashes to keep the overall metric below SLA. Is there a way to quantify this in numbers. Maybe we can draw the connection between these fixes and a better user experience that ultimately affects the app users' ratings in the Play Store?

I am primarily working on Python. Would like to know how common Go is in the web space.

And what are some resources for getting into web development using Go and how to performance tune and get a deep dive on the internals of the server?

I have been reporting to my manager for the last two years, but for the past six months, I have been working closely with another manager on a different project. My concern is that my reporting manager, who will decide my appraisal, might not have full visibility into my contributions. Since there is no 360-degree feedback process, how can I effectively showcase my work and ensure I get a fair hike? Any advice on preparing for upcoming discussions would be appreciated!

I'm a staff security engineer and my team was rescoped to Software Engineering. I'm nervous that I won't be able to keep my high performance as a software engineer at similar level because its not what I've been trained in. I've expressed this to my manager whom is also a new manager himself. I'm not sure how to handle this, do i just quiet quit and spend my time training until I'm let go or still contribute in hopes that I will make it through next round of interviews?