Staff Engineer

the taxonomy of staff engineers was a useful one and a good read by any engineer seeking technical leadership positions.

the interview portion of the book tended to be more repetitive than i would have liked, i do think it's valuable to consider real world lived stories when thinking about career trajectories.

i probably would have preferred less interviews with more in depth project stories, setbacks and lessons learned from the case studies.

with any opinion, there is bias to be aware of. all of the case studies are from fast growing organizations that are scaling rapidly. this makes sense as that creates efficient and quick opportunities for technical leadership as scaling people, code and systems become a constant challenge and a moving target.

i do think there is space for applying this to smaller organizations as well, particularly ones that aren't scaling, but have a growing code base, but with a static team size.