Stories of reaching Staff-plus engineering roles
As a &quot;staff-plus&quot; engineer at one of the big tech companies, I find that much of this material is simply not true in practice.<p>Staff promotions are of course given to <i>some</i> people with a good mastery of soft leadership skills, technical thought leadership and related qualities.<p>They are also given out for a number of other reasons. For example, when someone is perceived as a flight risk, because it makes their manager look good to promote their team, because someone has been given a lot of responsibility, whether or not they&#x27;re good at handling it, because it&#x27;s good for team morale to show that promotion is achievable, or because it can make a headache go away for the manager.<p>These reasons are all perfectly valid. But let&#x27;s not overdo the Jedi-like &quot;staff-plus&quot; engineer trope.