I ignore the spotlight as a staff engineer
7 days ago
- #Staff Engineer
- #Career Growth
- #Infrastructure
- The author, a Senior Staff engineer at Google, contrasts their experience with that of Sean Goedecke, who writes about the challenges of being a Staff+ engineer in product teams.
- The author works in developer tools and infrastructure teams, where the focus is on long-term stewardship and building systems rather than chasing quarterly business goals.
- In product teams, success is measured by revenue or MAU, and engineers must be agile to align with executive priorities. In contrast, infrastructure teams operate 'bottom-up,' focusing on what will most impact their engineer customers.
- Stewardship in infrastructure allows for compounding returns, such as efficiency through pattern matching and systemic innovation by solving long-term problems.
- The author led the Bigtrace project, which emerged from observing a persistent problem over time and building a solution that processes over 2 billion traces monthly.
- High-visibility projects often come with volatility and short-term thinking, whereas stewardship builds trust and the ability to say 'no' to harmful changes.
- In infrastructure, career advancement relies on impressing customers' managers (the 'Shadow Hierarchy') and demonstrating impact through utility, criticality, ubiquity, and scale.
- The author identifies as an 'Architect' or 'Tech Lead' archetype, focusing on long-term ownership and deep technical context, unlike the 'Solver' or 'Right Hand' archetypes Sean describes.
- This path requires a profitable company to sustain long-term infrastructure work and may involve luck in finding the right team, but staying long-term is a choice.
- The tech industry often emphasizes moving fast, but there is value in depth, patience, and building lasting foundations without chasing the spotlight.