The Staff Engineer's Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change

Tanya Reilly

Sep 2022 · "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

About this ebook

For years, companies have rewarded their most effective engineers with management positions. But treating management as the default path for an engineer with leadership ability doesn't serve the industry well--or the engineer. The staff engineer's path allows engineers to contribute at a high level as role models, driving big projects, determining technical strategy, and raising everyone's skills.

This in-depth book shows you how to understand your role, manage your time, master strategic thinking, and set the standard for technical work. You'll read about how to be a leader without direct authority, how to plan ahead to make the right technical decisions, and how to make everyone around you better, while still growing as an expert in your domain.

By exploring the three pillars of a staff engineer's job, Tanya Reilly, a veteran of the staff engineer track, shows you how to:

• Take a broad, strategic view when thinking about your work
• Dive into practical tactics for making projects succeed
• Determine what "good engineering" means in your organization

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About the author

Tanya Reilly is a principal engineer at Squarespace and has been a staff engineer at Google. She likes reading software design documents and coding on trains, and speaks at conferences about the senior IC engineer career path and the many ways humans can break software. Originally from Ireland, she is now an enthusiastic New Yorker and lives in Brooklyn.