Ask HN: What was your path to become a Staff Software Engineer?
Walked into year-end review and manager said "we're promoting you to Staff." No plan, no path, that was it. In retrospect maybe it was because I was always helping people out when they got stuck or just taking new tasks from the queue when I was done with my assignments, or any of a hundred other things. I never asked why. He may have told me why, but I probably wasn't listening.
Heh had to just push for the title and pay change. Because otherwise they were just happy to keep me at my rate and hire new engineers at the staff level.
It's nice when a company promotes. Lol.
As a "regular" engineer, every time someone showed me a way to do things that I didn't know, or didn't think of myself, I dug deep to learn it, and to figure out how I could have come to that myself. I also relentlessly made sure I always took responsibility for things I involved myself in, from both business and technology side. I became a bit of a product owner in addition to an engineer.
And then I took a leap and asked my manager for a path there, and we worked together to make the title stuff happen.
In title alone? Worked at a company too small to afford me and they gave me a title that was completely misaligned with industry.
If you mean aligned with the rest of industry? Even after having the title for > 8 years (~15 yrs total experience) I'd say I still do not consistently do "Staff" level work*, or at least I am currently unable to convince an interviewer that my work is "at that level" .
* I do not work at that level because there's no need at the employer, they really just need an army of low seniors.
A note that Staff Engineer means different things at different companies.
I was just promoted to Staff Engineer at a mid-cap household name company. I had joined as a contractor in 2020, came on full time as a senior engineer in 2021. Simply stated, it comes down to consistently and reliably delivering high quality work and maintaining good relationships with your coworkers.
A combination of merit-based promotions and title inflation within the company I was working in.
This was my path, too. I performed exceedingly well and did the hardest things nobody raised their hand to do. This was also a startup where I had been for a while. The added company specific context and industry specific context helped.
But really, I am not staff. I do not intend to sell myself as one, yet.
cloak and dagger my friend.. cloak..and..dagger