I think you should put the year when it was published (2020) in the title.
However, I had one particularly interesting approach where they tried to test Staff-level skills within technical interviews by expecting folks to call out the interviewers on the vague requirements and push for clarity.
Hey, this is increasingly prevalent for mid-level Software Engineer roles, like SDE II etc. System design interviews rarely are a simple “design this and that with zero constraints”, and if it does happen and I start pushing to set up some requirements, it gets awkward if the interviewer doesn’t play along and just reiterates no no, just assume sky is the limit and you can design anything. This really did happen, and did happen in context (e.g. internal transfers) where I had a pretty good idea how severe the constraints would be in real life.
One company added in a management behavioral interview to my process, which was great! I’d strongly suggest companies consider adding some parts of their line-manager interviews to Staff-level processes. This was the only place that really dove into key parts of a Staff role: How do you grow people? How do you manage conflict? How do you build influence? Do you know which hills you won’t die on and how to retreat?
Kill me, but this is something SDE IIs are also interviewed for nowadays.
How do you handle conflicts in your team?
How do you support growth of more junior engineers in your team?
How would you negotiate this and that with another team?
I really hate questions like the last set because they’re so vague. How do you handle conflicts? It depends on the personalities involved, the kind of conflict, and a load of other factors.
It wasn’t an interview, but when I started as Director of Studies at a Cambridge college they sent me on a mandatory training thing that had some concrete (fictional, but based on real experiences) things for the groups to work through. These had about a page of backstory of the people and the things that you’d heard and had been reported to you. They also had a bunch of additional information that was reserved for the people running the course that you could find out if you asked. You had to come up with a plan to handle them. I’d love to see something like this in management interviews but it takes a lot of preparation.
I’ve found it very interesting what the post mentions as each company having their own definition of what a Staff Engineer does. Since I started my current role, which I love, I sometimes look around to see what other similar roles exist. There are very few in my local market. I suspect that a lot of them either occur internally, or via networking - rather than in public job ads.
Based on my current job search, “staff” is going the way of “senior” in indicating little more than years of experience (3+ for senior, 7+ for staff). I’ve talked with companies where half of engineering is “staff” or higher!
In over 20 years I’ve never worked at a company that even had “staff”, so I don’t think there’s any trend, by time. My vague orientation is “the more techcentric and the more US, the more it has staff engineers; the more business-centric and the more German, the more it’s called differently - often Lead Developer, or just Senior, or Technical Lead, or whatever. Or still “our most experienced people become team leads”.
Depends more on the company, what tracks they have, and what people actually do.
I’m currently trying for promotion to Staff at Google and here it’s at least talked about as basically a different job. In practice, at least on my staff-heavy team, staff engineers spend a fair amount of their time doing work that could be done by senior engineers, I guess it’s done more strategically than tactically?
I think you should put the year when it was published (2020) in the title.
Hey, this is increasingly prevalent for mid-level Software Engineer roles, like SDE II etc. System design interviews rarely are a simple “design this and that with zero constraints”, and if it does happen and I start pushing to set up some requirements, it gets awkward if the interviewer doesn’t play along and just reiterates no no, just assume sky is the limit and you can design anything. This really did happen, and did happen in context (e.g. internal transfers) where I had a pretty good idea how severe the constraints would be in real life.
Kill me, but this is something SDE IIs are also interviewed for nowadays.
I really hate questions like the last set because they’re so vague. How do you handle conflicts? It depends on the personalities involved, the kind of conflict, and a load of other factors.
It wasn’t an interview, but when I started as Director of Studies at a Cambridge college they sent me on a mandatory training thing that had some concrete (fictional, but based on real experiences) things for the groups to work through. These had about a page of backstory of the people and the things that you’d heard and had been reported to you. They also had a bunch of additional information that was reserved for the people running the course that you could find out if you asked. You had to come up with a plan to handle them. I’d love to see something like this in management interviews but it takes a lot of preparation.
Gosh, I’d rather vague than “Tell me about a time when <incredibly specific sequence of events>.” I haven’t experienced that exact thing!
I’ve found it very interesting what the post mentions as each company having their own definition of what a Staff Engineer does. Since I started my current role, which I love, I sometimes look around to see what other similar roles exist. There are very few in my local market. I suspect that a lot of them either occur internally, or via networking - rather than in public job ads.
Based on my current job search, “staff” is going the way of “senior” in indicating little more than years of experience (3+ for senior, 7+ for staff). I’ve talked with companies where half of engineering is “staff” or higher!
In over 20 years I’ve never worked at a company that even had “staff”, so I don’t think there’s any trend, by time. My vague orientation is “the more techcentric and the more US, the more it has staff engineers; the more business-centric and the more German, the more it’s called differently - often Lead Developer, or just Senior, or Technical Lead, or whatever. Or still “our most experienced people become team leads”.
Depends more on the company, what tracks they have, and what people actually do.
I’m currently trying for promotion to Staff at Google and here it’s at least talked about as basically a different job. In practice, at least on my staff-heavy team, staff engineers spend a fair amount of their time doing work that could be done by senior engineers, I guess it’s done more strategically than tactically?