Got promoted to staff swe from data engineer - I later syndrome
Posted by Superb-Leading-1195@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 6 comments
Hi, so I was hired as a data engineer and worked my way to getting a promo. The problem though is that staff level expectations are to be a generalist distributed staff engineer. I have been in the staff position for a year and winging it but now my project is coming to an end and I will be asked to float around. What can I do to be better? Our tech stack mostly is golang, protobyd, Postgres, rabbitmq etc. team works on building orchestrators, event driven systems, general backend API etc.
DeterminedQuokka@reddit
So I’ve been a staff engineer for over 3 years. But I recently got a new job. The thing my manager likes the most about me is that I’m interested. He brings up a lot of different things and I will talk to him about them. Since you have less background in product engineering you likely have less to pull on but try to approach with curiosity. Like oh I don’t know much about that but I’d love to learn more. Ask for time to think through stuff if you need it. If you are trying to be helpful people will appreciate it. Anyone worth knowing knows how hard it is to be a staff engineer they won’t be a jerk.
With all of that don’t lie. If there is something you really won’t enjoy and you know that (try everything once) be honest that you aren’t a good fit. It doesn’t mean you won’t have to do it anyway because that’s the job sometimes. But I’ve been really honest with my manager that I don’t like writing front end and I don’t really care enough about it to actually be a strong asset there.
Learn how to pick your battles. Some things are easy enough you might as well do them. Some people have so much power fighting them isn’t a good use of your time. Some things will obviously be useless once you have any data and that is faster than talking people out of it.
Superb-Leading-1195@reddit (OP)
Thank you for your in depth answer. This makes sense on how to navigate the org landscape very well. Appreciate the response. Follow up - how do you pick up projects which you don’t have much expertise in specially the tech stack? I always feel like if I said I am interested in learning this, it automatically means I am expected to lead it and deliver it.
DeterminedQuokka@reddit
I mean that is sort of like staff. I own most of the things I said I would look into. Because someone needs to own it. Staff isn’t as much about having expertise as being able to get expertise. So I always assume I can learn whatever I need to and I don’t really think about it that much. You definitely can say I need a moment to look into it first. But I think if you don’t want to own it the easiest thing is to find someone who does
slimracing77@reddit
Be the subject matter expert and guiding voice on all things data. Work to improve both the workflow of the data engineers as well as educate and enable the rest of the engineering staff interfacing with your data org.
That’s what I’d expect from a data engineer turned staff.
Superb-Leading-1195@reddit (OP)
Thank you, I agree with that being the expectation of a staff DE. Moving into a generalist role, I feel a bit out of my depth given that I have seen staff engineers in my group working on a broad array of problems that I find myself unfamiliar with.
EuphoricImage4769@reddit
Same path, the secret is 1) most people have imposter syndrome and 2) if you’re curious and industrious swe is not that difficult to hack from a non standard background. Figure out how to use what you need to build to solve real problems, pay attention to how other swes are solving problems, and if you come across a few that are particularly anal about stuff like design patterns and clean code, copy them