The Staff Engineer's Path

Chapter 8. Good Influence at Scale

How do you raise the skills of the people around you? As a staff engineer, part of your job is to enable your colleagues to do better work, to create better solutions, to be better engineers. We already started on this journey last chapter with the idea of being a role model engineer: doing the best engineering work you can and letting others see it. That’s what we usually mean when we say someone is “a good influence.” They behave in the way we’d like others to behave.

But now we’ll go further and look at more active ways you can use your good influence to improve other people’s skills and your organization’s engineering culture.

Good Influence

When you work with someone who is missing skills or has lower standards than you, don’t get frustrated: take the time to bring them up a level.

Why is it so important to help other engineers do better work? First, good engineering inevitably goes beyond yourself. If your colleagues do better work, you can do better work too. While some engineers are extraordinary solo artists, even the most powerful virtuoso will meet some problems that are too big to solve alone. If you can help your colleagues become better engineers, you’ll be working with more competent people, which means your own work will be easier (and less annoying). Better engineers means better software, which means better business outcomes.

The second reason is that the industry keeps changing. Even if your engineering organization is on ...