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A review by naleagdeco
Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track by Will Larson
5.0
This book is a very valuable one to read if one is at the senior level and is wondering how they should move forward with their career. I'm not 100% sure if if it has motivated me to pursue or to decline pursuing a formal staff engineering role, but as I find myself ad-hoc filling in organizational and process gaps at my company, out of professionalism and a desire to grow, I do appreciate a book that maps out the potential ramifications and potential structured ways to do this.
In many ways, I think any senior engineer should read this book even if they decide they don't want to change their job title. The ability to recognize the organizational and process gaps that this book discussess, as well as foramlizing the need for performing the glue and collaboration and non-heads-down work that the stereotypical developer tries to shrug off onto others, was a very useful framework for me to wrap my head around as I navigate my career. Even I decide that I'm fine where I am, I think that this book allows me to adopt aspects of this seeming staff model even as a mere senior engineer in the near term.
I felt many strong feelings, both in agreement and in opposition to the book, as I read it. I suppose that's the point; I don't like a lot of the directions this book points in, but it's very possible that I have to accept that this is the current evolution of the software development industry, especially as the current pandemic/remote-work trend brought NY/Bay-Area-Engineering-Culture out to the rest of the areas where software developers work. In that sense, I'm glad this book at least gives me a bunch of things to anticipate and grapple with should I decide to go down this path.
I originally thought that the interview sections at the end would be a giant denoument, and I went over each person's story much quicker than I did the first part of the book, but there are some gems in how people talked about their particular individual experiences that both clarified what I did not want my future to move towards, as well as comforted me by knowing that there were anxieties or seemingly unideal daily work patterns that were more common than I was anticipating. In that sense, the stories were a nice grounding to balance out the theoretical ideal that the first half maps out.
I am very happy at how many links this book supplies for further reading. This book, if nothing else, serves as a starting point into a large curated set of worthwhile writing on the industry.
In many ways, I think any senior engineer should read this book even if they decide they don't want to change their job title. The ability to recognize the organizational and process gaps that this book discussess, as well as foramlizing the need for performing the glue and collaboration and non-heads-down work that the stereotypical developer tries to shrug off onto others, was a very useful framework for me to wrap my head around as I navigate my career. Even I decide that I'm fine where I am, I think that this book allows me to adopt aspects of this seeming staff model even as a mere senior engineer in the near term.
I felt many strong feelings, both in agreement and in opposition to the book, as I read it. I suppose that's the point; I don't like a lot of the directions this book points in, but it's very possible that I have to accept that this is the current evolution of the software development industry, especially as the current pandemic/remote-work trend brought NY/Bay-Area-Engineering-Culture out to the rest of the areas where software developers work. In that sense, I'm glad this book at least gives me a bunch of things to anticipate and grapple with should I decide to go down this path.
I originally thought that the interview sections at the end would be a giant denoument, and I went over each person's story much quicker than I did the first part of the book, but there are some gems in how people talked about their particular individual experiences that both clarified what I did not want my future to move towards, as well as comforted me by knowing that there were anxieties or seemingly unideal daily work patterns that were more common than I was anticipating. In that sense, the stories were a nice grounding to balance out the theoretical ideal that the first half maps out.
I am very happy at how many links this book supplies for further reading. This book, if nothing else, serves as a starting point into a large curated set of worthwhile writing on the industry.