What do you even do with a staff engineer

I feel like managing a staff engineer is like getting given a really good dog that has already learned more tricks than you. You’re just standing there with this leash, “Whose walk is this?”

You can’t give them tickets (you can, but like, you just bought a race car to go to the mailbox). You can’t really use the usual tools. Maybe you’re not as familiar with their space as they are. They don’t need you to teach them how to decompose a project. So... what do you do?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. The best word I can come up with, which seems fancier than it really is, is sponsorship.

If you break down what they’re actually doing, it’s a lot of things you can’t give them. Provide technical direction in a space. Mentor. Bring engineering thinking into decisions made on a floor or two up. Grab the ambiguous problem that no one owns and also do a lot of unsexy gluing stuff (notice the important thing that isn’t being driven to). You can point someone at a problem. You can’t put them in the schedule of having a vision for this on Tuesday at two.

Well, it starts with someone having enough context and trust to get started. This year has been hell for context. There hasn’t been a hallway since March. No overheard discussions in the coffee area. That’s where a senior engineer could hear about what’s happening next quarter. If it’s not in a document or calendar invite, it’s not happening. You leave a staff engineer out of planning discussions and they become a very expensive person that is working with whatever is in the backlog. Which is weird to spend money on, tbh.

One thing I notice in myself and most managers want to do is give them your overflow. Do this hire loop for me. Follow up on this dependency of the other team. Listen to this awkward conversation. That’s all cool, for a little while. It congeals if left to itself, and suddenly you are a manager without a title and the power, but there has been a death of the staff.

There’s an odd space with feedback. They think the staff engineer must know how they’re doing. So no one gives them feedback. And they also often have long term cycles in their work, so it could take them a year to get feedback on whether they set a path that worked. Imagine throwing a paper plane off a tall building and never getting back where it landed. You need someone to come down the stairs and tell you. That includes the bad news. “Well you know sometimes it’s cool when you say you’re right in a way that makes people stop arguing with you, but that’s not the same as making them convinced.”

Sometimes it’s going to cost a quarter for a bet they made before they pay it back. And you need to be the one to defend that quarter in the rooms they’re not in. That is probably the best place to spend your credibility. If you’re unable to defend it, then they need to know why from you before the rumour mill.

Probably the hardest part is even assessing their work. One staff is improving the quality of one team for a year. Another person disappears for a quarter to solve one nasty problem. They reappear and it’s solved. And another is generally hopping around teams influencing decisions. You don’t see those commits. That’s three different jobs all with the same title. One is completely right to disappear in that problem. For the one that should be leading a team, that’s a minor disaster.

Maybe the first discussion is figuring out what they’re doing in the first place. Most of us might not have asked that before?