The Staff Engineer's Path

Chapter 7. You’re a Role Model Now (Sorry)

“Don’t think out loud,” my friend Carla Geisser warned me when I became a staff engineer. “You’ll find out a month later that people are talking about your half-baked idea like it’s already a project.” My colleague Ross Donaldson described his own role even more starkly: “Being staff doesn’t absolve you of being wrong, but it does mean you need to be careful when you open your dang mouth.”

This is the blessing and the curse of a staff engineer title: people will assume you know what you’re talking about—so you’d better know what you’re talking about! Your work will be a little less checked and your ideas considered more credible. Rather than guiding you, people will look to you for guidance.

Most of all, you’ll be a role model. How you behave is how others will behave. You’ll be the voice of reason, the “adult in the room.” There will be times when you’ll think “This is a problem and someone should say something”…and realize with a sinking feeling that that someone is you. The behavior you model will show your less experienced colleagues how to be a good engineer. Later, in Chapter 8, we’ll look at how to actively, deliberately influence your organization and colleagues for the better. But this chapter is about passive influence, the kind that you have just by the way you act as an engineer and as a person.

What Does It Mean to Do a Good Job?

Your company might have a written definition of what good engineering means: written values, ...