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Staff Engineer

Leadership Beyond the Management Track

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About this listen

At most technology companies, you'll reach Senior software engineer, the career level for software engineers, in five to eight years. At the career level, your company's career ladder won't require that you work towards the next promotion; being promoted further is an exception rather than expected. This is also when many engineers are first given an opportunity to move into engineering management.

Over the past few years, we've seen a flurry of books unlocking the engineering management career path, like Camille Fournier's The Manager's Path, Julie Zhuo's The Making of a Manager, Lara Hogan's Resilient Management, and even my own An Elegant Puzzle. The engineering management career isn't an easy one, but there are maps available to help navigate it. What if you want to advance your career without becoming an engineering manager? The technical leadership path remains relatively undocumented, hard to navigate, and inconsistent across companies. Staff Engineer is your guide to building your career towards a staff engineering role, receiving the title, and succeeding within the role.

©2021 Will Larson (P)2022 Will Larson Career Success Employment Leadership Management & Leadership Programming & Software Development Software Development Career Technology Business Software Management Programming Engineering Management
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The content of the book is excellent, very concise, informative and insightful. Definitely with the reading, even if you are a manager or has a senior role that's not precisely “staff engineer”.

The audiobook does not keep up with the quality of the content. Although the narrator performance is good, the audio editing cuts off mid-sentence at the end of multiple sessions and chapters - nothing that compromises too much the understanding, but very annoying.

The book content is outstanding / audiobook has editing issues

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Some of them shouldn’t be staff engineers. They were just on right place in right time. Perserverance prevails.

Many views of different staff engineers

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amazing book, truly; crystallized a lot of a complex role that I've been doing for a long time; some minor editing problems - like chapters cutting off mid-sentence, is vexing; I don't want this to reflect badly on the author or narrator, but: audio engineer? get your head in the game!

amazing book, shame about some editing

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It was a good take on a hard job to define. I enjoyed the anecdotes. There seemed to be a lot of meaningless buzzwords around the job title that I wish could have been explored more deeply.

Buzzwordy

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