Unlocking Success at the Staff Engineer Level: Shifting Mindset and Building New Skills

Many Sr. Software Engineers want to get to Staff/L6 level, but once they get promoted, they often lack a clear understanding of what it truly entails. 🤔

In most cases, managers provide support to help Sr. Software Engineers advance, but that support structure disappears once you start operating as a Staff Engineer.

Instead of just focusing on checkboxes for promotion, observe some of the best staff+ engineers around you and learn how they operate.

Many newly promoted staff engineers don’t realize this – as an individual contributor, the higher you go you’ll be writing less and less code and more and more focusing on collaboration, mentoring, and reading code.

You will be spending more time thinking about how to make your team successful and not just your own project. It’s a shift in mindset, but it’s where the real game begins!

Go in with a mindset of learning new skills not with a mindset that I am already there. Becoming a seasoned, well-respected staff engineer in the org takes time.

Here are a few lesser-known skills you need to develop to thrive as a Staff Engineer:

🤝 Learn to collaborate effectively with colleagues who have different priorities. Building alignment is a key skill at this level.

💼 Figure out how to work on projects and initiatives that truly matter for the business. Understand the larger strategic goals and align your work accordingly.

🔄 Stay in close sync with your manager, their peers, and the broader organization’s priorities. Regular communication ensures you’re aligned and focused on the right areas.

🎯 Focus on onboarding, mentoring, and coaching junior engineers. Your experience and guidance can have a tremendous impact on their professional growth.

Share your experiences and thoughts on operating at the Staff+ level in the comments. What challenges have you faced? What advice would you give to others aspiring to reach this role?

Cracking Behavioral Interviews: Key to Successful Managerial Hires

Over the years, I’ve interviewed many engineering managers, and here’s what I’ve noticed…

Those who didn’t receive an offer often failed in the behavioral rounds.

And yet, many candidates seem to underestimate the importance of preparing for these interviews. 🤔

Sure, coding and system design rounds are crucial too, but behavioral interviews require just as much focused preparation.

Behavioral interview questions appear simple on the surface, such as “Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a co-worker.”

But it’s the ability to craft a crisp story and answer follow-up probing questions that sets candidates apart. 📝

So, how can you prepare for these behavioral interviews? Here are a few tips that I learned from experience:

1️⃣ Start by writing down all the challenging and interesting people situations you’ve successfully handled in your career. 📚

2️⃣ Next, make a list of commonly asked behavioral questions, which you can easily find online. 🌐

3️⃣ Map your examples to these questions, ensuring you have a compelling story for each. 🗣️

4️⃣ Structure your answers using the STAR framework: Situation, Task, Action, and Result. 🌟

5️⃣ Anticipate the follow-up questions the interviewer might ask, and be prepared with realistic answers. ⏭️

6️⃣ Dive deep into the company values and job description, and subtly connect your examples to these through your answers. 🤝

7️⃣ Don’t be afraid to be vulnerable in some of your examples. Share how you failed, what you learned, and how you bounced back. 🌈

8️⃣ Remember, your examples don’t have to be all success stories. Authenticity and growth are equally valuable. 🌱

9️⃣ Utilize different projects and situations to answer different questions, showcasing your versatility and problem-solving abilities. 🔀

🔟 And most importantly, start with a framework approach to demonstrate that you have a mental model to tackle various situations. Show them your strategic thinking. 💡

So, the next time you prepare for an interview, remember that behavioral interviews require just as much attention and preparation as technical rounds.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences with behavioral interviews. Share them in the comments below! 👇✨

The Power of Small Teams: Finding Fulfillment Beyond Organizational Growth

For a first-time manager leading a small team, it’s natural to dream of managing a larger team, leading multiple teams, and climbing the management ladder. But here’s the thing…

When you’re too focused on team and org size, you might overlook the incredible impact your current small team can make. 🚀

I learned this the hard way. As I moved up the ladder, I realized that the most interesting and impactful work happens within small, driven teams. Front-line managers get a front-row seat to that ride. 🎢

And the satisfaction of seeing your team solve a difficult technical problem or deliver customer value in record time is unparalleled. It’s a different level of fulfillment compared to just hiring more people, creating multiple teams and hoping they’ll deliver. 🙌

Once you’re one level removed from the ground work, you lose that sense of satisfaction. So before you become obsessed with a group manager or senior manager role, think twice. 🤔

Don’t miss the opportunity to experience the joy of working closely with your team, witnessing firsthand the impact they create. 💪

Fostering Collaboration in Code Reviews: Balancing Technical Brilliance with Soft Skills

Have you ever come across engineers who are brilliant at code reviews but struggle with the soft skills needed for a productive and collaborative process? 🤔

I’ve noticed this quite a bit in my career. These engineers are incredibly talented technically, but when it comes to providing feedback, they can be quite aggressive and authoritative, especially when pointing out mistakes made by junior engineers.

If you are reviewing code or design as a senior technical leader, here is what you DONT need:

❌ A harsh and aggressive approach that only focuses on pointing out mistakes.
❌ An authoritative attitude that simply tells junior engineers what to do without explaining the reasoning behind it.
❌ Neglecting to appreciate the effort put in by junior engineers.
❌ Failing to provide constructive feedback in a respectful manner.

Here’s what you DO need:

✅ Take the time to explain the problem and the reasoning behind your suggestions.
✅ Find a balance between appreciation and constructive feedback.
✅ Be respectful and considerate when providing feedback.
✅ Create an environment where junior engineers feel like they are learning and growing.

Stop being overly critical and start being more supportive. Stop commanding and start collaborating. Stop missing out on the opportunity to mentor and guide others.

Remember, it’s not just about being right or wrong. It’s about how you communicate your point of view.

When you appreciate the effort put in by junior engineers and provide constructive feedback in a respectful manner, they will be more likely to come back to you for collaboration and guidance.

Embracing Strengths and Overcoming Perfectionism

When it comes to performance review conversations, I’ve noticed a pattern.

When manager shares the review write-up, they cover positive feedback on areas where you created impact and performed well. They also cover critical feedback on things you can do better.

However, folks who are focused on career growth tend to overlook the good feedback and over focus on the critical/constructive feedback.

They start thinking about how to improve, why did I make that mistake, I know better than that.

Those thoughts start creating mental stress and take the focus away from the wins that you should be celebrating.

Many times, we tend to beat ourselves up too much for small missteps in our career journey.

Minor or small mistakes drag us down, and we tend to forget how far we have come.

At one point in my career, I received advice from my mentor that changed my perspective on this.

After one point in your career, you are better off doubling down on your strengths.

Don’t ignore weaknesses and critical feedback, but hitting a minimum bar on your weaknesses and doubling down on your strengths will give you better returns in your career growth.

So, know your strengths, and find a role that can leverage those strengths. That might be the fastest way to grow rather than perfecting every little thing from feedback.

It’s time to give yourself credit for how far you’ve come and focus on what you do best.

So think — What’s one strength you have that you can double down on today?

Career Growth: Beyond the Promotion Obsession

I have seen many software engineers and managers who are over focused on promotion.

When manager asks them about career growth their short answer is “I want to get to the next level”.

There was a time in my career, when I thought about career growth like this too.

I was lucky to have a great manager at the time. My manager explained it to me that promotion is not the only way to grow.

When it comes to career growth, here’s what you DON’T need:

🚫 A singular focus on promotion as the only measure of success.
🚫 A mindset of comparing yourself to others who have recently been promoted.
🚫 Checking boxes based on promotion criteria without considering personal growth and development.
🚫 Getting obsessed with promotion on a day-to-day basis.

Here’s what you DO need:

✅ A focus on developing skills and personal growth within your current role.
✅ Celebrating small wins and progress along the way.
✅ Looking at career growth as a multifaceted journey, not just promotion.
✅ Keeping a long-term goal of promotion in mind, but not getting bogged down by it on a daily basis.

Stop obsessing over promotion as the only measure of success. Instead, focus on personal growth and development within your current role. Keep a long-term goal of promotion in mind, but don’t let it consume you on a daily basis.

The Inbox Struggle, Mental Health, and Disconnecting from Wor

When I was a manager, I constantly struggled to keep up with my inbox. It was the primary source of mental stress for me.

If I was unable to get to inbox zero, I wouldn’t be able to sleep well because some of those threads would run in my head at night.

Because of inbox overload, I had to put in more hours at night or early morning to catch up on inbox or reply to those slack messages, or finish my own work.

Because of this struggle, I was never able to fully disconnect from work even when I took a day off.

Late in my career, I realized the importance of truly disconnecting from work. Your todo list will never be done. There is always something awaiting your reply, but prioritizing mental health is important.

Role modeling this is hard but if you are a manager, take time off yourself and make it a point to fully disconnect.

Also, encourage your team to do the same.

Coming back to work refreshed after a break actually makes you more productive.

Technical Spikes: Accelerating Execution and Mitigating Risks

Value of Technical Spikes

🚀 Many times, in interest of moving fast, engineering teams forget the value of technical spikes.

💡 Technical design reviews are useful, but going one step further and prototyping the most riskiest piece just enough to de-risk the project actually accelerates the execution.

👥 It is most effective if the senior team member pairs with the engineer who wrote the technical design and executes the spike.

👨‍🏫 Junior engineer can learn from senior team member, and spike execution happens fast too.

🔍 In addition to de-risking, a prototype solution surfaces other technical nuances that are otherwise hard to uncover during tech design review.

💪 Technical spike doesn’t have to be perfect, it just need to be good enough to build confidence in team’s ability to execute the proposed solution.

What are your thoughts on technical spikes? Have you used them in your projects?

Navigating Solo Founder Challenges: The Art of Balancing Engineering and Customer Priorities

The Balancing Act

👨‍🏫 As a solo technical founder, I’m learning the balancing act between solving every interesting engineering problem and prioritizing what matters to customers.

👨‍💻 Initially, building a product from 0 to 1 is enjoyable because you have full freedom to make architectural decisions and improve the code. Prioritization matters, but changing priorities isn’t a big deal because you don’t have users yet.

👥 Once you have an MVP and a few users, prioritization becomes crucial. You might be tempted to refactor or improve a piece of code that’s already working, but it’s essential to focus on things that matter to customers.

⚖ In a bigger company, there are processes, advice from senior leaders, and learnings from previous experiences to help make these decisions. But as a solo founder you are on your own. It comes down to trade-offs between engineering craftsmanship and delivering customer value

🤹‍♂️ Juggling between the engineering and product manager roles is hard for me. It’s a challenge, but it’s also an opportunity to grow and learn.

❓ If you have any specific frameworks or tools that have worked well for you, share in the comments below!

The Connection Between Running and Idea Generation

🏃‍♂️ There is something about going out on a run and getting creative ideas during exercise.

🪄 This doesn’t happen to me that often if I run on the treadmill. But there is some unique energy I experience from running outside. It stimulates my brain in a way that I come up with solutions to the problems I have been struggling with or think of a topic to write about on LinkedIn.

📝 I usually write down topics that come to my mind in the notes app but many times I don’t get time to write a LinkedIn post. It just takes time for me to write a good LinkedIn post. It’s different than some of the other social networks.

⏰ One of the problems that keep people from posting on LinkedIn is – they have ideas and thoughts but they don’t have time to craft a perfect post.

Amplifeed solves this by becoming your companion that helps with turning your raw thoughts into a first draft for your LinkedIn post. If you are interested in trying out sign up for our waiting list on Amplifeed.ai