The above trailer’s last line is “Now you’re thinking with portals…” and honestly I think that that mentality is what separates a good engineer from a mediocre one. Good engineers are of course naturally curious, but they have an innate ability to see around corners and make the impossible possible. Take the trailer, then relate it to your day to day life, you’re put in impossible tasks and sometimes in excruciating mental pain, yet somehow a good engineer will take that scenario and turn it into a win.

I’ve had this list laying around and honestly I don’t know that its worth putting into paragraph form, so I present it here in its raw form Being staff + is about: lifting up engineers helping teams find their voice, giving them agency and ownership helping architect the right problem at the right time for the tough problems thinking strategically understanding value to the company being approachable and working well with junior to c-suite being a role model being a leader having courage to say the tough things acknowledging limitations documenting and mapping keeping everyone in the loop turning groups of people into high functioning teams knowing when its “good enough” knowing when it will stop being “good enough” This list will probably grow as I think of more things, so I’ll probably keep editing this list

What is being approachable, and how is it a Staff+ Skill?

In my second in the Staff Engineer Series , I want to write about a skill that I had been practicing unconsciously, but didn’t expect to make it a core part of my job: making my own work. Making my own work started small with research on my own, then progressed to creating an initiative on standardizing our database source control as Liquibase, automating manual processes, and helping define our IaC stack.

I think over the next month I’m going to start a series on what skills help make a staff engineer. Staff engineers responsibilities extend way beyond just coding expertise. Staff engineers rely heavily on many various soft skills; today we’ll be discussing translating. What do I mean by translating? It can have a couple of different meanings, depending on the context. First we’ll start with the simplest, in writing. Staff engineers are often tasked with breaking down product’s vision into an actionable plan.