so here's what I want to do I want to level set what is a staff engineer right so this is a a chart that I stole from staff.com it's a great resource if you all want to check it out I have no affiliation with them but generally the way these things work in the engineering world is you have a entry level engineer and then midlevel and then Senior and that's where it becomes interesting you can either go down the IC ladder which is a yellow box or you can become a manager but at at a lot of companies senior is like a terminal level and that's where you have options and that's why it's important to like get to that point and then you can decide okay do I want to go down the IC ladder or management we're talking about the decision here if you want to pursue going down that individual contributor ladder and staff engineer is particularly interesting because that's where I consider you're the first true level where you have to be a leader you have to even if you're not a manager you're a leader as a individual engineer and not everyone gets the staff engineer it is a very challenging promotion it's also worth calling out that it's Unique in the engineering world that you have a viable path to getting paid more and having more influence and more scope as an individual not as a manager if you think about a salesperson for example or maybe even like a product manager it's very challenging but I don't think there's such a thing as like a distinguished salesperson like the way you acrew more compensation and more scope as a salesperson is you go and manage more sales people but engineering is unique in that we have leverage we have tools at our dispos osal that allow us to make ourselves or other people more productive and that's a pretty magical thing I think about our role as an engineer and I think it's worth just reflecting on that and we'll probably talk about that today just one other thing I want to talk about here is like one way to think about the progression is what is your scope as you progress the ladder right so entry level you're talking about a task and then a feature and a project and when you get to staff you're talking about multiple projects or maybe even a whole product right so you really are talking about many people being impacted many different parts of the code base and then you go all the way up to principle or distinguished and then you have perhaps impact across the whole industry like you've invented some open source framework or some way of doing like a methodology that is adopted across the whole company or industry okay so I'll pause there and now let's go into open Q&A I have a couple prepared and maybe the one that I would like to start with is that a big part of being a staff engineer is getting enough scope to justify the promotion and not all problems that you can tackle are created equal and so I'm curious for each of you how did you identify which problems in your career are actually worth solving does that make sense because you could work on menial bug fixes that never get you promoted how did you all figure out what to work on yeah I can jump in here so I when I was at Netflix I actually was that's where I felt like I was at that inflection point between senior and staff and initially I was working on like these detection projects of trying to detect threat actors and all this stuff with Flink and they were trying to build out this thing called like a sockless security system like a it's like a security system without a security Operation Center and it was like all just automated and one of the things I recognized pretty quickly was that this was a lot that this was a lot that this was not this was like almost too ambitious and so um I noticed that there was another project that we were working on which was like this graph database that was going to hold on to all the information on like applications databases data sets customer data like all the different connections of just everything in the infrastructure and it was going to be that fundamental infrastructure and they were like hey Zach do you want to work on this and I'm like that sounds like something that is g to give value even if even if it doesn't get used for that case right it has branching use cases and I recognized that I needed to get off of detection and onto that and that's really where that's when Netflix gave me a lot more money that's when I definitely got a lot more respect from people at Netflix and I definitely felt like I was in that more leadership role after I transition to that and I think that was the big thing I recognized was that like more than just like what you were saying that rul about you don't want to be working on like tasks or things that don't have enough scope but you also don't want to be working on projects that are like high in the sky and projects that like are risky right that might not even pan out right because that's also very important what I've seen the more senior people get the more they have this muscle to determine how much impact there is in a project before investing time into it and so you might experience this where you're asking more senior person for some small change and they might actually never get to it because they have that muscle and they're checking it they might be quick to backlog things and at the same time if you are able to show them projects that have particular scope maybe they involve many different orgs or maybe the metrics and road map Milestones that they're achieving are quite important to the org like maybe it's something that matters to a group of 30 people rather than something that's like a small thing within a team developing that ability to see what matters and see what is impactful and then invest your time accordingly is really important and how do you develop that muscle Ryan is it just like looking at past projects and figure out what worked yeah I think the way that I developed that is through looking at the incentives of the org so you can see most teams publish plans and you can see some team is planning on moving this metric by 5% or something like that and I have an idea that's going to move it by 7% or something in my mind I'm thinking okay that project if I do that that achieves A Team level goal so it's somewhat substantial also there's some intuition too I think at some point I worked on some ads projects even though it was like completely unrelated to my team just because I saw okay there's a pretty substantial opportunity for revenue and I just knew that okay this is going to be good for the business and it turned out that it it was quite impactful and that led to my senior promotion so it was something that no one really assigned to me and I was just digging around for ways to have impact and then one quick logistical note so there are a bunch of questions coming in chat so please keep those coming for questions that you also want answered then give a reaction to it and that'll help the five of us prioritize what we want to tackle I have a question for Karly and Lee given that you both have management experience a very tactical one is do you like or when you were going through the ranks to a staff engineer how explicit were you that I want to be a staff engineer help me here's the timeline and like how transparent was that conversation with the manager and maybe relatedly what do you look for what advice would you share with people here to look for in a manager who can support them to get to this high of a level yeah that's an interesting question so I manage staff Engineers now as part of my role and I will say that everyone handles whether they feel comfortable asking for a promotion differently a lot of the time I'd say 50% of the time that I've been approached about wanting a promotion to staff level I've felt that person wasn't ready and the other half of the time I felt that person was ready a long time ago and so it's really a personality thing I think the people who feel most comfortable asking maybe are the ones that do a lot more self-promotion and maybe feel like they want to take on ambitious projects even when they haven't shown that they're ready and then the other group of people are the people who feel like they have to do a lot to prove exactly that they're ready and maybe get one year past being ready before they feel comfortable asking I don't know the best way to go about this or how you balance either one of those things I think it's probably healthy to do some self reflection and see if you actually think you're ready but also not set the bar so high for yourself if you're a shy type of person that you end up holding yourself back by not asking soon enough um and it's been funny I've very rarely seen anyone ask for it like right when they're ready either too early or a little too late yeah so my take on that and the sort of like people asking about it or seeking it is that there there is this difference in people who are really ambitious and really want to move up quickly and they might have sometimes an inflated sense of self and like where they're at and then the other people that are maybe more reserved are like oh I've been told that promotions are trailing so even if I'm performing at that level I shouldn't ask about it yet because I haven't been doing it for long enough and my take is while it's true at a lot of big tech companies promotions are trailing if you aren't having the conversation then you don't know know what you're missing and you may think that you're knocking it out of the park and you're just waiting for your manager to hand you a promotion or tell you they're putting you up and you haven't even asked and they're like oh yeah your Tech is solid but you haven't done anything to improve the lives of the engineers on the team or reached out across teams or presented your work to Executives like you're missing a lot like we need to cover that and you hadn't mentioned you wanted to be promoted and people will of course I want to be promoted that's not true as having managed people not everyone wants a promotion or wants to pursue that now it might be that they don't want to take that work on and they may never want to be promoted and if they're in a terminal role at senior why they may not want it so you need to actually Express that you are interested but you don't have to express it when you're you think you're ready you can express I am interested in moving up the technical track I don't want to move to management and I don't want to stay at my current level I do want to move up but I don't think that I'm ready now I just want your perspective perspective on What's Missing and I want us to start making a plan and working on documentation so that when I am ready you have all the collateral you need but you can talk about your career in that way with your manager it is really important that you share that is what your interest is because they may not know otherwise and they may not they may be like oh yeah they're doing a really solid job for them to get a high rating in this role I need them to do this work that might be different work than I they want to take on something that requires more leader ership and that isn't going to check the boxes on their current roles rubric for them to get the very highest rating but it may set the stage for them to get promoted and those could be like different so even if you're a high performer they may not be thinking like yeah we're going to promote you in the next few quarters and that's a great Point Lee about promotions being trailing at many of these companies there's a very related question Carly for you you mentioned that half the people who came for the promotion were ready they were ready for a year they had been ready so Diana I think is asking would you promote someone without asking or do you always want to get their permission want them to initiate what has been your philosophy with that I think it can go both ways I've I can think of times where I have come to someone with a promotion when they haven't necessarily asked and been like I think you're ready for this do you want this but the majority of the time I have 44 Engineers under me like I can't necessarily keep track of every single person's progression at every single point at the year-end reviews it's a good time for me to reflect but if you feel ready or you feel like you're going above and beyond in between them don't wait for me to come to you at your yearend review right that's the best Cadence for me because that's when I have the most to reflect on the past year I'm doing planning for the next year I'm trying to see where we want to grow our team and how we want to grow alongside the business I think that if you wait for that's taking kind of a passive approach to your own career and your own life it's better to be more active than than not right in the same vein it's better to ask too early than too late for my opinion because I see very little downside to asking too early other than like Lee said getting feedback on where you can grow as long as you can take feedback right and I think that's the big distinction if you're going to ask for a promotion and you're told that it's too early be willing to hear the feedback because you probably have blind spots that you're not seeing your promotion doesn't come out of my paycheck right it doesn't really affect me necessarily if I feel like you're ready it's in my best interest to fight for you as your manager there's no reason why I would want to gate keep that from you if I'm a good manager we've all had toxic people in our lives so forget that those people exist for a second and just assume that everyone is well intentioned if your manager says you're not ready it's not because they're setting some sort of unreasonable precedent or they're wanting to be gatekeeping most likely it's because you have a blind spot that you're not seeing and how you handle feedback is as much a part of whether I think you're ready for promotion as anything else because to me a staff engineer needs to be able to hear feedback from their leaders hear feedback from their team implement it maturely and be self-reflective and if you take feedback and you get mad or you argue or you say I'm actually ready because of X Y and Z and you get combative you're further proving the point that you're not necessarily ready so I'd say asking early doesn't have many downsides sides unless you're not someone who can handle feedback and handle hearing the word no and I want to put a really fine point on what Karly just said about like your ability to take feedback and what you do with feedback being an indicator in and of itself the first time my manager tried to promote me to L6 as a manager at Amazon it didn't go through and when he came to me I was very tactical about it and was like okay cool so what was missing what were the biggest objections how are we going to fix that going through each thing and being like okay what's the artifact for that you're saying that I'm missing this how are we going to show the next time that's not the problem and a month later I went on paternity leave and then when I came back I was promoted I didn't really do anything different except ask how to fix it and come up with the ideas of what we going to fill the Gap and that was essentially like what pushed it over so that will nness to hear the feedback and take action on it was what got me promoted not doing one more project or my team doing one more project so just she's right what I want to just add one more thing here about this though because if you disagree with the feedback and you actually do think that like it's [ __ ] interview and see what happens and uh maybe another company will agree with you and that's what's happened in my career and that's because I've only ever been promoted one time in my career and that was from Junior to midlevel every other promotion has come from a hop yeah you don't have to freaking like if you if you have a manager who's trying to carrot and stick your ass like all the way up and all that stuff freaking like maybe just leave that's like another option that is also an equally viable option that can also work but you also still need to learn how to take feedback I'm not saying I'm not trying to be like oh yeah don't take any feedback always just leave I'm not that that far right but like sometimes like there are managers out there who do give you feedback that are that is absolutely ridiculous that is like not true and they actually don't know who you are and so that's where interviewing outside especially if you're getting feedback that you disagree with that is a very good thing because then the market will tell you if you're ready as well the market will tell you Carly I 100% agree with you about you should ask too early like one thing that has become increasingly obvious to me throughout my career is that expression of the squeaky wheel gets the greas if you want attention you want money you want anything Make Some Noise right if you want to talk about how great your work is you want to talk about promotion you have to advocate for yourself and you have to talk about it I think the Nuance here is the phrasing of it how you frame yourself and what you want matters a ton I think that's Lee you were alluding to that a little bit if you say hey I joined the company a week ago I want to get promoted you're not going to get very many Advocates on your team or your manager probably won't advocate for you but if instead you frame it as hey I'm new my goal my number one goal right now is I want to ramp up I want to have a ton of impact I want to help the people on the team but would you be okay in three months can we have a check-in about what promotion looks like right if I was a manager I would 100% say yeah I'm totally aligned with you right now focus on ramping up Landing some tasks writing some code and then in three months I am more than happy to figure out how you're trending and what you can do to get promoted that way you've communicated that you really care about promotion but your priorities are straight like your priorities are correct at least from the team perspective so I feel like the the way you advocate for yourself matters a lot definitely yeah and I would just add asking for promotions early talking about it explicitly I know some people feel a little uncomfortable about doing that or maybe like it's asking for too much but it's just definitely better I've experienced it at every point before getting promoted I was very explicit about hey I'm this level what do I need to do to get to the next level and it was not an uncomfortable conversation and my manager was also happy about it too because he wants me to grow because then his team is having more impact and in some cases too when they would say oh you're probably going to get promoted to this level I would ask even about the next level after that because thinking okay this one's probably going to go through what's the next thing I can do how can I keep going and keep that momentum so that's even more cringe if you don't like asking for promos to ask for two in advance but you totally can my manager is not upset at all and it worked really well and Rahul you mentioned about like Leverage when you're interviewing you have leverage but also I've seen that you can also have leverage within a company if you're a really high performer your manager wants to retain you so if you ask for things and you've been doing a lot of great work or you've been solving a lot of their problems they you'll see that they're a lot more receptive to helping you with your career growth or getting things done whereas if you're a less High achieving person you might be lower in their list of priorities so there's also ways to have leverage within if you get a lot of things done for them and you're really critical piece of the team but what is also true with that is like your manager can't snap their fingers most places and promote you there are processes that they have to work through there's other people making the decision what is true is they do have control over a lot of things and you can have leverage with them to say I really need projects that are like feeding the areas that you say I'm missing towards promotions if I can't get that on this team let's just be honest about that and let me find a different team where I can or look outside that is real that is a thing that they can really affect but they can't just say oh you know what you're saying promote you or leave yeah I'll promote you today it's just not real unless it's a really tiny company or like you work for the CEO or something so yeah like I know when I was at Airbnb all promotions before the staff promo were like essentially controlled by the manager if the manager thought you were ready you could get promoted to mid level or to senior but senior to staff that and and any promotion after that was promotion by committee and I was always like I don't know about these committees bro even at Amazon when there wasn't like committees for promo it was like skip level normally like senior manager up through through senior but then like director for principal keep going up the management chain so it didn't it still wasn't up to your manager unless again you were a senior engineer working for a director which would be somewhat unusual like it happened it wasn't just like your manager even there where there wasn't panels yeah yeah that's interesting that you mentioned that Zach about lower levels more in control for your manager I definitely noticed that if you're trying to get promoted from Junior to midlevel even if a committee is making the decision there's not a lot of ambiguity in that promo what your manager says is probably what's going to happen it's really important that you and your manager are aligned and then at the highest levels yeah you're going to need to get sign off from VPS and Edge leads and your manager becomes more and more of a messenger middleman for that committee and that's why it's even more important to say you want to get promoted earlier because then they can start trying to get that feedback from the committee earlier and you can see what the company's thinking if you're looking at those really high levels okay I have just one more question and then hopefully we'll have time for a couple from the audience or maybe from the four of you if you want to bring up anything but the okay the first question I asked was about evaluating different projects the second question is about evaluating manager now I want to talk about evaluating the team so the joke I make to people is if you're at Apple right Apple has tons and tons of products and if you're working on garage band good luck atting promoted it's never going to happen at least not at the senior level like no one cares about garage band but if you work on the iPhone or if you work on one the core properties of Apple the likelihood is way way higher so that's like my at least one heuristic to use to evaluate what team is the better vehicle to get you the promotion so that's maybe the last question I want to ask is how do you all think about organization or team within the company to get a staff level promotion sure yeah I I think that what you're saying is definitely true and you can make the best of where you are or what teams you're looking at if you're working on garage band and you find that real-time audio response in the operating system is insufficient and you go to the team that owns that point that out to them show them where in their code or even ask if you can sit with their team and fix that and then you make that change or you affect that change as a strong partner that is very different than you made the sliders a little bit smoother and garage band so there are ways to leverage where you're at to have higher impact in visibility but certainly if you are on the flagship product that visibility comes for free for me the most important thing wasn't necessarily the project that I was working on being high impact it was if I cared about the project I was working on because that's when I can do my best work so if I was working on challenging problems that I found interesting I would almost always flourish because I could give my best and I could step up to meet any Challenge and I felt interested to dive in and get into the week needs and really solve the problems facing our users and if you also are a user of the product and you're like passionate about it depending on what it is it's going to be so much easier for you to give it your all to show up to be a good Advocate to influence other people it's hard to do that when you don't give a [ __ ] about what you're doing so for me there was a time where I was interviewing at Google and they were like you do you want to work on ads I don't give a [ __ ] about that I'm not going to lie I that wouldn't be exciting to me I don't want to get up everyday and work on ads for some people it would be really fun because it's at a huge scale it's at a really highly influential part of Google's business obviously for me I it could have been the most influential project and if I didn't care I wasn't going to be showing up so that's how I've taken things in my career is based on my own passion as opposed to like the impact of the business and then turned my passion into something yeah so there's a few General Trends I've noticed with promotions and it just depends on the levels so for typically up to senior there is scope for promotion on pretty much any team anywhere at least from what I've seen within Fang if you're looking for promotions past senior so L6 plus it becomes a little more nuanced and I've seen that there's generally certain teams that uh can get promoted more easily this all depends you know on those particular team situation but one cut that is interesting to think about is product teams versus INF structure teams past L5 so going into staff and hire I've generally tended to see that there's a lot more senior Engineers on infrastructure teams and my thinking for why that is the case is product Engineers the way that you have huge impact past L6 is typically through leverage of controlling large projects with many different Engineers on them and there's a limited number of those spots so if you want to be the one building the overhaul of some major product experience you want to be that Tech lead one person for 60 Engineers so there's a lot less spots for that whereas on infrastructure teams people who are building underlying pieces that are very technically complicated and they help everyone at the company move faster there's natural leverage in the technology itself and so there's a lot more roles and opportunities I've seen on infrastructure teams specifically for these very tail more senior promos past L6 and and onwards and I've definitely experienced that I'm on an infrastructure team and my team is quite senior relative to other teams that I've seen and I think it's just a natural setup for how the ORS are set up and The Leverage that you get from the technology versus The Leverage of leading a team yeah I want to follow up there because I've actually been in both positions there at Netflix I was more of like a tech lead staff person on infrastructure team building out like that graph database and then at Airbnb I was like the tech lead on pricing and availability where I was more of a product like Tech lead data engineer and I've noticed especially in data engineering that is even more the case where it's like the more you lean into more of like infrastructure and you're not just like building like singular pipelines but you're building like how stuff is uh being done if you're focusing more on the how work gets done as opposed to what work gets done that is definitely something I've noticed as as get further along the ladder that you need to have more of that because then it's like if you are changing how other Engineers are doing their job and like you're saving Engineers five 10 minutes a day but then that scales across hundreds of Engineers you're saving so much time and energy and creating so much efficiency and that's a great way to be leveraged and I that's why I think I totally agree with Ryan's point on there's a lot more opportunities in infrastructure teams in big tech for that because of you are impacting how work is getting done as opposed to like what work is getting done and that yeah 100% totally agree with that so I I will frame it a little bit differently yes that is true like infrastructure work often Bridges a number of different teams and has naturally a certain amount of impact because it might be a foundational piece of infrastructure but I think that what you need to see is what is the impact available and do managers in that space know how to promote people and then who sees the work that you do on that team if you're the senior most person on an infrastructure team and you work on a piece of infrastructure that no other senior staff engineer sees it probably isn't going to be a thing that can get you promoted so when you're evaluating it yes infrastructure teams tend to have those like opportunities more frequently but just because it's infrastructure doesn't mean it's set up for that and just because it's product work doesn't mean it isn't you still have to do the next level of evaluation of like what work do I do there that is going to have this impact okay so I want to go through a bunch of the question there's a ton of questions in the chat so for the last 10 minutes we can go through a couple of those that I pulled out but before that I'm curious Zach Lee Carly Ryan if you have anything that you saw was particularly interesting or anything else that we haven't covered so far that you want to talk about I'm cool to go to audience Q&A let's see how many we can bang out yeah so actually yeah for these Maybe my my preference or my opinion would be let's focus on throughput rather than depth so maybe just one maybe two of us can answer okay so the first one here is highly voted how do you compete with employees who are in proximity to the manager versus those who might be full-time remote or hybrid and they don't have as much FaceTime or interaction with the manager Al go big thing there is just documentation communication make sure that you have proof right proof is going to be the big thing of I would say that's going to be the number one thing there and and I haven't really worked on a hybrid environment I've only really worked in a full remote environment but I think that's going to be your biggest way to to get leverag here I like it was asking about the appropriate number of hours so I'm curious for each of you this some meaningful project that you worked on to get to staff do you feel like you had to put in an abnormally higher number of hours to get that promotion mine was more than 40 hours a week I'll say that yeah same same like for me I was probably working like 50 55 and at Netflix when I was building out that graph database I was grinding for sure yep yeah same I would say somewhere 50 to 60 always got my sleep but I was working most of my week or most of all of my weekdays that being said I've seen people get promoted working 40 as well but I was just down to grind so that's what I did I guess as an outlier I don't I did not when I got that promotion as a manager work more than 40 hours a week I had earlier in my career as an engineer worked a lot more than that a lot of that has to do with what you're doing and where the time is going and it may be the case that to deliver something it is going to require more time if you're working on something here's my perspective I worked on Force multiply a lot more than on individual delivery and it's not to say other people were like doing it wrong not at all but like the people side can show that impact in less hours spent so if you can make people super super effective then your the number of hours you work might not have the same correlation to impact as when you are delivering something yourself that's super impactful that's it yeah I guess if we're going around the circle I'll say that yeah I the way I viewed it is I never viewed it as okay this week I'm working 50 hours I've never thought of my work that way I've always started with okay what do I want to get done this week and yeah very frequently the amount of time I would need to dedicate to get that done would be more than 40 it' be like 60 but then the following it could be like 30 so I I view my job less as here's the number of hours I'm working and much more about what is the goal of what I'm trying to do rugu has a highly voted question titles outside of big Tech are generally inflated so you might be a principal or senior principal or distinguished engineer at a startup but then you get down leveled when you go into meta or Google what should these people do in terms of in terms of work or impact to avoid being down leveled when they interview at fank getting downlevel it's because you're not at the level they expect you to be I don't really it sucks but that's the truth you can't avoid it unless you just are better or interview better sounds me but that's just the truth like a lot of times they're inflated because they have to do that like it Banks your vice president at like mid-level engineering sometimes it just happens so I wouldn't focus on that I would focus on looking at what those jobs mean at those companies and like maybe you're working as a principal engineer but that's senior engineer work at these companies or senior engineer scope at these companies so you're not getting down levels you're getting leveled correctly those companies but you need to know what is the right thing to Target don't just Target L5 and you know that are mid-level and hope that they like see how brilliant you are and instead give you an offer for a senior but don't think that it's like a down level because your title changed y especially when you're taking the step from these outside companies into big tech companies if you're getting paid three times as much and your title is two steps lower what the [ __ ] do you care like you are getting paid just like if you are doing meaningful work at the level that you are capable of like the title what it doesn't I yeah that's what happened for me I know I was a mid-level engineer at a startup and then when I got the job at Facebook I got a junior role at Facebook so I'm from mid-level to Junior but it was like an 80% bump in pay so I was like okay sure I'll go down the ladder for 80% more money yeah I'm down yeah and also about the yeah the levels are arbitrary but if you see the scope of what you're doing and you compare that to the scope of what these other companies expect at those levels you can see there's some mapping of okay I'm leading a small team and I'm called a vice president maybe that's a senior engineer at Fang and so you can think more about the work itself rather than just the titles all right what do you all think do we have time for one more before before we do like closing remarks yeah let go for it let's go for it all righten asked a long time ago um seniority also open up more opportunity like more ability to work on interesting projects or with cool people and so in that case it's a chicken and egg problem right where you can't get promoted until you have big enough projects but you don't get big enough projects until you get promoted so any commentary on that yeah I would say that to some extent yes it does help to have seniority but I guess seniority doesn't matter as much as your internal brand so if you're someone who's known to get big things done and your manager your director or your senior manager they have some big problem think about who they're thinking to give that problem if you're the first person that comes to mind that's where you want to be and your level often correlates so if you're already already by senior person you're probably getting things done and your manager trusts you to solve that problem so you are have more opportunities as a result but also if you have great visibility you're someone who is well known internally and you're a rising person that solves these big problems you can still get those problems as well so the commonality is being visible being known as someone who can get things done will give you more opportunities I will say title is a way to get doors to open it is not the only way to get doors to open so it is very similar to what Ryan said yes you might be trusted with a larger project based solely on title some places if you like just got there and you're brand new but you were hired into a role at a certain level but you can be someone that you know is a mid-level engineer but be given really high scope because you have a manager that has convinced people of this your own actions have already convinced people of and you have that trust you have a sponsor that is a like director level person that thinks you should take something on like you essentially you're going to have to find that scope and get those doors to open it's not just title title can help okay beautiful so in case people might need to drop off right at 11: California time then I I thought we could maybe do closing remarks I I might stick around for a few minutes after and just help out answer so if any of you four want to stick around with me would love that but before we go back to answering questions why don't we go around just say hey like maybe give them a pointer to where you want people to follow you or any call to action so Zach do you want to go first yeah for surey hey everyone I teach a lot of stuff about data engineering data science all that stuff so if you go to data expert.i you can make a free account there there's a lot of free stuff there and actually I just built out a SQL leite code project so data engineer. backquestions there's 50 questions there a lot of those SQL questions are really hard and they're free to try right now very difficult but definitely I'd love feedback on all of that I'll pass it to Ryan yeah you so for where to find me you can find me on LinkedIn I also write on substack if you thought this content was interesting or relevant to you that's basically everything I write about I try to write about career progression to staff hopefully it's helpful for you and you can just check LinkedIn and then most of my stuff's there I second I second that his is the developing Dev really good it's really good like exactly I pass it yeah so roll linked put our LinkedIn links in there that's probably the best starting point I also write on substack because I write a lot of words I'm not very concise so substack doesn't have the same limits but I also do find that it it is a better place to be able to find things later and Link out and whatever you can start at the LinkedIn but substack I write about a lot of like Tech Career things I also write about a lot of mental health things I'm an autistic person I have ADHD that makes some things hard and some things easier but like I I write a lot about keeping your mental health up or mine not being kept up and what I'm trying to do about it and stuff like that as well yeah I'm supposed to pass it off Carly I will say Lee is awesome to follow for uh general advice and just like awesome vulnerability so I think that your content's amazingly and I feel like Zach really paved the way there on talking about Mental Health on LinkedIn and got so much flak for it on Reddit Jes like you triggered those nerds LinkedIn lunatic bro I also write a lot on LinkedIn and on substack I [ __ ] post a lot on Instagram so if you guys are into that I used to write a lot more about career stuff but I think that people like Ryan are taking the Baton from me and doing a much better job and more thoughtful job so I try to keep levity on LinkedIn because I feel like it gets too serious sometimes so if you like jokes about Linux and other random stuff that's where I've pivoted to so okay amazing and then IO LinkedIn I definitely post a as well similar to everyone here and then the two things I want to show are number one my YouTube channel I that's why the platform I spend the most time on and then the second thing I want to just mention is that later today we have an event which is a case study of another person aside from Ryan Ryan is probably the most famous person who went from E3 to E6 in three years we found someone else and that person's giving a talk later today so I wanted to put those two links in the chat and and I care about this topic a lot I actually teach a course literally called senior to staff it's not going on right now but at some point I'll open it up again but yeah I just feel like this is something I think about a lot and I care about a lot so I appreciate all of you attending and I appreciate all four of the other panelists to be very thoughtful and and taking some time out of their day whoever needs to drop I'm going to hang out for a little bit too so we we'll see what we can get through before everyone gets tired of it and have meetings manager life is meetings endless see y'all later y I have a meeting also but thanks everyone hope you like the event thanks for for hosting got three of us for a little while longer let's see what we so there's one on here from Beast Mond talking about visibility and promoting yourself I will say this feels dirty sometimes or it feels bad or you some people are like more naturally shy or they are a little more reserved how you get that visibility can vary you have to have it to move up period people have to see people in positions that can speak on your behalf have to know what you're doing and support you but it doesn't mean that you have to every time you do an interesting thing post about it on a message board or in slack or something but it might be in the form of you do Tech talks after a major is shipped or you run the tech talk series and get other people to be showing up so you're doing that in a meta way it could be that you everyone knows who you are because you answer the questions on the internal stack Overflow or whatever it is there are lots of ways it does not have something that you're uncomfortable doing to like self-promote but you must be visible yeah and I I think like visibility as well is also from building an internal brand is do your teammates feel comfortable asking you questions are you approachable are you someone who like you can help unblock people because like when you go to get promoted like you have to have all that peer feedback right so can you have three can you do can you have at least three or four co-workers who are like yeah this guy's awesome and can you like and that they can that you can actually they can actually vouge for you that's if you can cross disciplines with that it goes even further if you can be a person that product managers are like yeah they ask the best questions and they get things done cool if the data scientists are like yeah they make sure to instrument things so we can always figure out what happened like the more people in different places the better because if you're just like oh Engineers love him but product managers hate them you're still not moving up okay so Ain asked very early on and we just never got back to it what is the main inflection point for you when you decided to seek uh promotion and then also was it the money was it the title was it better work life balance that you thought you might get moving up so I will say for me I wanted to do a certain kind of work and that was something that I saw that people with higher titles that people in senior engineering roles principal engineering roles at Amazon were getting to do that I wanted to do and I did just start doing them but it was also like one of the main reasons I wanted to move up and a lot of that work was like influencing people on the management side that were higher up like being able to get the feel from other engineers and then influence and make things better for them it was mentoring people and being able to do that effectively and understand what it actually takes get there and if I haven't done it myself how am I going to tell them how to get to senior if I can't get to senior or whatever so that was the main thing for me but yeah of course I like getting paid like that's cool but it was a lot about the kind of work I wanted to do yeah two two things I want to call out here one first of all Erin sorry I missed it I'm glad you're still here so two things that came to mind for me about what I the reason I wanted staff yeah first of all money is good money is nice and the thing is that when you get promoted in big Tech at least your compensation doesn't go up linearly it goes up geometrically in the sense that you're not it's not like you get paid $220,000 uh from going to entry level to mid level and then 20K more from mid level to senior you probably get paid like 50k more mid level to senior and going from senior to staff you probably get paid like 100 or 200k more right so there's a substantial difference in the amount of total compensation you receive by getting to staff and I think money is optionality and I like that and that curve also changes based on the growth of the company so so a lot of times your mix of compensation moves more towards stock when you are getting to these higher levels and so yes it can be that they're targeting to pay you 150k more but then if the company's stock also doubles now you're making like 600k more having moved up and moved a lot of your compensation towards rsus or other stock-based comp so that's another thing that like it opens up growth with the company but that also comes with risk because yeah want to add to that though that does come with a lot of risk cuz I actually had the opposite experience cuz when I signed at Airbnb I got a stock my grant was like 1.5 million over four years and but that was at when the share price was at 210 and then when I was there in 6 months it went from 210 to 80 so my $1.5 million went to like 600k and I'm like damn I'm like yeah I didn't know I didn't know a man could lose so much money in six months but and it just varies while I was at Amazon I was there from 2012 to 2021 or something in the stock oh yeah that's up and to the right that's just amazing but like at Google like the stock is about back to where my grant was I don't know it's not always that I'm just saying that is a another thing that changes yeah and well one more thing I wanted to add and this might sound maybe Politically Incorrect or not so good to think about but pedigree matters I I don't care how much people talk about oh Tech ism is Merit based pedigree and like name brand matters a ton because I think fundamentally humans are we we just do pattern matching and in some ways that's good in some ways it's bad right like it could it could be held against you if people have pattern matches on like race or gender that's obviously bad but there is also maybe the the flip side which is hey you worked at meta or Google and you're a staff engineer at Google most of other staff engineers at Google are pretty good and so from pattern matching I assume you're pretty good and so I really wanted to be able to effectively set a floor on my next job or on my startup to say hey I am an ex meta staff engineer and you can call that ego you can call that whatever you want but that did matter to me and I think it should matter to anyone who really thinks about career progression and job hopping okay I'm gonna answer one from Ram that just whatever is easy to answer what is the average team size for a staff engineer I don't think about it as team size I think about the number of people you impact because you should be impacting across teams unless you're like working for a director then maybe you're impacting the director's or or whatever but I would say that like for a senior engineer you should be at least affecting like yourself and a senior manager's scope so if you work for a line manager but they report to a senior manager hit that other senior manager's teams too it's normally like 20 to 30 Engineers probably at staff it's probably up to 50 to 60 or more more at principal or the next step up it's probably in the hundreds you're probably affecting like a vp's org so that that roughly if Zack or R you want to talk something like when I was at Airbnb and I was on like Marketplace because I was on more like narrowly focusing on pricing and availability but there's all the other Marketplace Dynamic stuff and that whole org was like 75 engineers and I was impacting like the data in that org but I was also not like the only staff engineer I think there was like five there's like Airbnb also leans very heavy in the staff engineer if you look at their job board right now they have 35 Staff positions open and that's it that's that's it that's the only people they're hiring right now it's just so ridiculous like cool so the last one maybe I saw and now it's so hard to scroll in this chat oh my God I'm sorry I don't know who it was but it was asking about politics and how that affects things and whatever relationships matter people matter you can call it politics if you want but it's all people there are people that are jerks and you have to play nice with them to move up there are people that are backstabbing and they are using politics in the negative way to move up you probably aren't going to change that or get them fired or bring them down you need to bring yourself up when you're talking about politics what kind is it if it's really toxic maybe it's just not the right place but otherwise a lot of times when people say politics what they mean is I can't communicate very clearly with people in executive roles or I don't get along well with this other team or whatever and you just have to fix that you have to be able to do that and you also whomever ask sorry asked about NE neurodiversity absolutely I am autistic I have ADHD I have depression I have anxiety it is hard I had to learn some lessons in a hard way I ran in eventually a manager was like Hey you are right with almost everything that you say but the way that you say it can be too blunt and people can't hear it so you need to find ways to be heard and be right not just be right and so it was like oh if you are just like no that will never work people might not listen to you but if you're like oh hey the last system that I worked on we tried to do it that way and it really fell apart so have you considered like when you hit this inflection point will your the system still stand up that's a much different way of saying it and people are going to be much more receptive I ask a lot of questions I make a lot fewer state hey have you thought about this hey what about that oh you know what I don't know if that's going to work did you prototype that asking those things is much different than your idea is terrible and it will never work even if you know that to be true you need to get it to be heard that's my general take I think like one of the highest measures of intelligence is not like what you say it's what questions you ask that's like a life thing too not just an engineering thing yeah okay amazing for the 130 of you who stuck around 10 minutes past the hour I really appreciate it Lee Zach thanks so much Zach I love the work you're doing in data engineer and Lee I love the consistency you have with writing so appreciate all of you awesome bye everyone see you all