Unpopular opinion: With quickly growing organizations and therefore more inexperienced people managers, promoting someone to staff engineer is an easy way out of responsibility.
How often have I heard "you’re at a point in your career now where a people manager will only hinder you" to justify not being capable of supporting me.
I’ve seen the opposite problem far more often. Less experienced managers who are perfectly fine at managing junior engineers attempting to manage senior engineers in the same way.
It’s refreshing when a company realizes that staff engineers with 15+ years of experience don’t need daily management.
Curious your thoughts on who a Staff should report to. I've been at a handful of places where there were Staff Engineers (some of them even deserved it!) and it always seemed like the promotion from Senior to Staff came with a change in reporting structure, where now instead of reporting to a Manager you're reporting to a Director or a VP, even the CTO in smaller orgs.
I think this is a good indication of increased authority/responsibility, but also an easy way to shirk management responsibilities as you said. How much 1:1 management is a VP or CTO going to be doing with a Staff Engineer? Do you really want a VP with all the political nonsense that comes with that type of position to have their own pet engineer they can bother about things?
As a staff in practice, but not in title, here's how it works for me: My manager and I are at the same level. We work as peers. They handle the people stuff of the team, I handle the technical stuff of the team. They help with routing people/HR/management questions, I help with routing technical questions.
If you think "Gosh, that person (on another team) sure was rude", that's a question for my manager.
If you think "Gosh, I sure have no idea why that API (from another team) sucks", that's a question for me.
In terms of reporting to my manager it feels more like having a corner-man in the boxing ring than a boss. I fight the fight, they say "Hey you're dropping that right hand on your left hook, stop that or you'll get rekt. Here's some ice". And they spend more time thinking about and navigating politics-like issues in the org than I do, which means I can lean on their expertise when "org stuff" is needed.
I probably have similar or more years of experience than my current EM. The person we both report to, happens to be a true greybeard.
I'd argue that if you're a staff engineer, you need to be adept at navigating the "political nonsense." A director/VP should be able to think of you as at least as senior and capable of handling ambiguity and being self-directed as any manager.
Staff engineers that report to directors or whatever the equivalent 2nd or third mgmt level is are most effective in my experience.
An important part of the job is to “borrow” your boss’s authority and for that to work they need to have some. I’ve seen staff engineers be ineffective because of their boss’s position many times.
Reporting to someone higher than director you start getting too disconnected from on the ground stuff (architecture astronaut syndrome) and lower the ground is all you can see.
How often have I heard "you’re at a point in your career now where a people manager will only hinder you" to justify not being capable of supporting me.