This is the hidden side of staff engineer. The bit books don't get written about for the same reason "how I got rich" books leave out the people who worked hard but got less.
Somewhere someone has to have the time to build out the tools, then dig the foundations and lay the scaffolding and the supporting walls. None of which looks like the artists impression and none of which has a web interface you can show.
So Staff engineer is like architect. Holding the nervous customers hand while they spend a fortune to have a large hole in the ground.
You cannot build a bridge by stacking bricks in front of the customers feet one at a time in a nice iterative process. You cannot always "see" progress at the user level.
to me the signature of really good software is when one marginal change delivers outstanding value and the engineers just say "was that it".
Somewhere someone has to have the time to build out the tools, then dig the foundations and lay the scaffolding and the supporting walls. None of which looks like the artists impression and none of which has a web interface you can show.
So Staff engineer is like architect. Holding the nervous customers hand while they spend a fortune to have a large hole in the ground.
You cannot build a bridge by stacking bricks in front of the customers feet one at a time in a nice iterative process. You cannot always "see" progress at the user level.
to me the signature of really good software is when one marginal change delivers outstanding value and the engineers just say "was that it".