I was working towards a promotion to a Staff Engineer at Shopify. While I was there, I joined a book club where engineers were reading Will Larson’s book, “Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track.” Unfortunately, I got laid off before we finished the book club sessions, but I kept reading it on my own. It had been on my reading list for almost a year, and I hadn’t planned to start reading it for a couple more months, but the book club inspired me to start earlier. I finished reading it after starting a new job at HubSpot.

After getting laid off by Shopify, I tried applying for Staff positions at many companies. Even though I hadn’t worked as a Staff Engineer before, I felt I should give it a shot. At my previous job with Delivery Hero, I noticed that promotions were more challenging to get than getting hired directly. I thought that since I was already performing at that level, I could get the position despite my lack of experience. But my theory proved wrong, at least for the companies I applied to. Some said I was very close to becoming a Staff Engineer, but there were one or two missing pieces. Others said that even though I was a strong candidate for the Staff position, the hiring managers wanted someone who had worked as a Staff Engineer for a few years. One hiring manager even offered me a Senior position with the potential to be promoted to Staff within a year. It was tough trying to get a Staff position, especially without a previous track record.

Though not getting the Staff position saddened me, reading other people’s stories from Larson’s book made me realize one thing: reaching the Staff level is really difficult. Being a Staff Engineer at one company doesn’t necessarily mean you can become a Staff Engineer at another. Having experience in a specific domain also matters. Many successful Staff+ Engineers in the book got their positions because they were lucky enough to join a company in its early stages. Knowing how things worked and how systems are interconnected was crucial. A Staff Engineer should be able to work across multiple domains and teams. If you were one of the first fifty engineers at a company, it’s easier to become Staff+ when the team grows to five hundred. I believe the path is more or less the same. You need to learn and take ownership of a significant part of the business operations. However, it’s not easy to follow this path once the team is large and everything is more stable. Nevertheless, I’ve seen it’s achievable.