anonlevelman in
Ready for Staff
How can I judge if I am ready to aim for a Staff position (at, say, a tier-2)?
10 years startup experience
2 years L4 at Google (was downleveled in interview)
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madscienceSoftware Engineer
Staff level engineers have a lot of influence and have a lot of breadth and depth to their roles, working cross functionally across a ton of different stakeholders, possibly global experience, etc. I'd say if you have a lot of experience in that regard, you could be ready for it. But L4 at Google and startup experience typically is pretty far off from a traditional staff level role.
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eightysixerSoftware Engineer
This. The unspoken part here is that a large part of your job becomes solving people problems in addition to technical ones. Good people skills are required for nearly all staff roles.
Also a lot of the work you do stops having an immediate feedback cycle like you get from shipping SW. You will work on stuff for months without any idea if your work is actually going to have a payoff or not.
When are you ready? IMO, when you have a track record of joining teams and leveling them up, and all the above work sounds interesting.
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