The Staff Engineer's Path

Chapter 4. Finite Time

When I was new to the industry, I used to wonder why my senior colleagues seemed so wary of committing to things. I would demonstrate that something was a problem and, inexplicably, my boss and the senior engineers around me would not drop everything and go solve that problem. Why didn’t they care?

Now that I’m the senior colleague, I get it. As a senior person, you can see a host of problems: architectures that won’t scale, processes that waste everyone’s time, missed opportunities. When someone points out one more, you add it to the list.

The good news is that you’re unlikely to run out of work. The bad news, though? You can’t do it all. While you might like to jump on every problem, you quickly learn that doing that is just not sustainable.¹ You have to make peace with walking past things that are broken or suboptimal (or just really annoying) and taking no action.

Doing All the Things

In this chapter, we’ll talk about choosing what to do. As a staff engineer, you’ll have choices to make every day: whether you should join an incident response call, how you’ll respond to a request for mentorship, whether to take on a particular side project. Not everything can be your problem. So what should be?

We’ve already looked at opportunity cost and only taking on work that’s important for the company, but in this chapter I want to add an extra layer: what’s important for you. Choosing projects that support your growth, reputation, and happiness can feel a little ...