Resources and support that have helped me on my Staff+ Engineer journey

When I first encountered the term “Staff Engineer” about 5 years ago, I was struck by how little guidance, direction and documentation were available about the role and its expectations. However, eventually I found Will Larson’s website and his insightful interviews with various senior technical folks in the industry. Eventually he published his book “Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track” in 2021. Then I came across Tanya Reilly and her blog post entitled “Being Glue” and felt like someone was finally helping me put words to the things I cared about professionally.

The Staff+ Engineer community has since experienced tremendous growth, and the current challenge lies in finding the suitable resources and support that align with your specific goals.

Disclaimer: By no means am I saying that I am an expert & know what I’m doing just because I’ve read some books or listened to some podcasts/webinars.

I will share the resources I’ve used and how they’ve helped me so far:

• Will Larson’s book “Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track” helped me put some structure around what a Staff Engineer should be doing and thinking about and to read stories from real people in the industry.

• Tanya Reilly’s blog post on “Being Glue” and her writing in general really resonated with me. Her book “The Staff Engineer’s Path” dives deeper into the various parts of a Staff+ Engineer’s journey to discuss the responsibilities and expectations of the role, what good looks like and how to chart one’s way forward.

• The LeadDev community organizes free webinars on various topics on leadership. They also have a Slack channel dedicated to the #staffplus topic on the LeadDev Slack org not to mention an entire conference series.

  • Some of the webinars I’ve enjoyed:
    • How to become a staff+ engineer
    • Essential soft skills you need to succeed as an engineer
    • An engineering leader’s guide to reporting up
  • The LeadDev YouTube channel is a great treasure trove of past talk recordings, and this playlist of StaffPlus Broadcasts is particularly great.

• Other people whose writing I enjoy and have learned/are continuously learning a lot from:

  • Charity Majors
  • Emily Nakashima
  • Lara Hogan
  • Camille Fournier
  • Pat Kua and his free LevelUp newsletter

Here’s hoping that this list is helps someone in their growth journey, wherever they might be.