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.