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Book Notes: Staff Engineer

Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track by Will Larson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Staff-plus roles split into these common archetypes:

  • Tech lead – guiding the approach of a particular team (or two) with complex tasks, coordinating and unblocking.
  • Architect – responsible for the success of specific technical domains by setting direction, defining quality and approach within an area.  Combining in-depth knowledge of technical constraints and user needs.  This is not the toxic preconception that architects design and pass on to others to implement, in staff-plus roles this is more about influence.
  • Solver – finding solutions to challenging problems.  Either assigned for a short period (hot spot fixer) or longer.  Problems already prioritised.  Common in companies that think of individuals rather than teams in terms of planning and ownership.
  • Right hand – provide additional bandwidth for a leader borrowing some of a leader’s scope and authority to operate.  Tend to dive into a fire, edit the approach and delegate the execution to jump to another fire.  You always work on essential problems but move on before they have actually been solved.

It is quite common for people without the staff-plus title acting in many of the staff-plus archetypes – being a staff-plus role is a mix of the acting in the archetype, the behaviours, the impact and the organisation recognising these things.

What do staff-plus engineers do?

  • Setting the technical direction – effectively a part-time product manager for technology by understanding and solving real needs of the organisation, less about prioritising technology and approaches you are personally passionate about.
  • Mentorship and sponsorship – growing leaders around you to help the organisation improve its problem solving abilities.
  • Providing engineering perspective in decision making – decision making needs to balance efficiency and effectiveness, here a staff-plus engineer can help provide valuable inputs representing all the engineering interests.
  • Exploration – this can be an ambiguous important problem that the company is ill-shaped to address.
  • Being glue – doing the needed but often invisible tasks to keep the team moving forward and shipping its work.

The environment staff-plus engineers work

  • Complex and ambiguous – the sort of work tends to be poorly scoped, complex and important. From broad, unclear (and potentially wrong) statements the identification of a concrete approach that works will be needed
  • Numerous and divided stakeholders – problems might have neither alignment around the problem nor the solution.  Management might see this as critically important but engineers feel it is fine as is.  It could be agreed that it is a problem but with disagreements about the approach that should be taken.

Named bet where failures matter – it is going to be sponsored by a senior leader, the work staff-plus engineers do will likely be widely communicated.  This means that success or failure will be highly visible – as such failing well (early, with learning, appropriate level of risk) is a critical skill.

Save money by not using an Oyster Card, a paper ticket with a Railcard is cheaper

We have always been told that traveling with Oyster is cheaper, but the key words in their adverts are “single journey”.

oystervsticket

If you need a Zone 1-6, 1-9 1-9+ Watford Junction, Broxbourne, Hertford East or Shenfield then traveling by Oyster is not cheaper if you make (generally) make more than a journey from the end of the line to Zone 1 and back again Off Peak.

paperticketscheaperthanoyster

A journey from Watford Junction to a station in Zone 1 is £6.50, so a return (£13.00) would already exceed the reduced Travelcard fare (£11.50) with the Railcard discount but would not hit the cap without it.  A journey from Zone 9 to Zone 1 is £4.10 so you would start saving after your second journey.

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You can load 16-25, Senior, HM Forces or Disabled Persons Railcard onto your Oyster but not Two Together Railcard, Family & Friends Railcard or Network Railcard.  It is easy to understand why Two Together Railcard and Family & Friends Railcard can not be easily applied to Oyster automatically because this covers more than one person but I find it impossible to fathom why they don’t allow Network Railcards to be used.

What is the point in this?

This is mainly motivated by my new job where I’ll be spending more time in easter europe – a part of the world which is both similar and different to the UK.

The aim is mainly for me to make some notes.  These notes will probably be about one of three things – places I’ve visited, things I’ve learned and experienced and things which interest me.  Who knows where this will lead but sometimes 140 characters are not enough.

It is through the receiving and sharing of knowledge from learning and experiences which drives innovation and change.

Management 3.0 - Cogs of Innovation
Management 3.0 – 5 Cogs of Innovation