I ignore the spotlight as a staff engineer

https://lalitm.com/software-engineering-outside-the-spotlight/

by todsacerdoti • 8 months ago

547 243 8 months ago

Beautifully-written post, full of insights. Thanks for sharing!

beernet2• 8 months ago

> instead of execs telling us “you should do X”, we figure out what we think will have the most impact to our customers and work on building those features and tools

What could possibly go wrong here?

0x696C6961• 8 months ago

The same things that go wrong anyway?

sd93• 8 months ago

What do you mean? The quoted text is the exact strategy I always use.

I don't want or need to be told top down what to do, it's better to think for myself and propose that upward. Execs appreciate it because it makes their jobs easier; users get the features they actually want; I get to work on what I think is important.

What am I missing that makes this a bad strategy?

wordpad• 8 months ago

If your proposal doesn't align with leadership vision or the product they want to grow...

qznc• 8 months ago

I think this is the most efficient approach. Decisions should be made at the lowest possible level of the org chart.

However, it has an important assumption: You are sufficiently aware of higher level things. If you have a decent communication culture in your company or if you are around long enough to know someone everywhere, it should be fine though.

beernet2• 8 months ago

More often than not, things don't turn out too well if engineers decide what to build without tight steering from customers and/or upper management. This is exactly what it sounds like here. Tech for the purpose of tech. I understand this is HN and we have a pro-engineering bias here, at the same time, engineers don't tend to be the greatest strategists.

flohofwoe• 8 months ago

Nothing, except maybe an asteroid hitting the building and wiping out the entire team?

zdragnar• 8 months ago

That's the dream at a big company for sure. The last mega tech company I worked for had the familiar trap of not knowing how to rate higher level engineers. Things basically turned into a popularity contest, with grading criteria like your "impact on or leadership in the tech community" and other such nonsense.

Quietly making good things and enabling good people to be better is where it is at.

zwnow2• 8 months ago

As long as quietly making stuff pays off, sure. If I get a bigger paycheck just from being known by the higher ups I'll go for the popularity contest. People work to feed themselves and their families after all and considering how unethical big tech is, I dont think anything u work on could do anything to better the world. So yeah, popularity contest and doing as little work as possible it is.

lotsofpulp2• 8 months ago

People work to feed themselves and their families after all and considering how unethical big tech is, I dont think anything u work on could do anything to better the world.

A little hyperbolic. Members of my family have found great utility in accessibility improvements, language translation, video calling, navigation assistance, etc.

ownagefool• 8 months ago

The thing about your bigco, the OPs and the post he's talking about, is it's all so abstract from money.

You have two poles here.

1. The VC route, strikes gold, and never really needs to live with the reality of asking what an ROI is, it's all talk about spotlight, impact and value, without any articulation about cash money.

2. The MBA route where you effectively can't brush your teeth without a cost/benefit analysis that itself often cost multiple times your initiative, resulting in nothing getting done until you're in some tech debt armageddon.

The reality is if you're still making bank on the abstract without being able to articulate revenue or costs, you're probably still in the good times.

cm2012• 8 months ago

This description of the poles is so true from my experience

beauzero• 8 months ago

That was painful to read and acknowledge. Succinct.

verelo• 8 months ago

Couldn’t agree more (but frustratingly due to HN’ shitty mobile experience i downvoted this, sorry!)

In a past life i used to complain that people only praised my work after i fucked up and subsequently fixed it. I’d go month on month of great execution and all I’d hear would be complaints, but as soon as i “fixed” a major issue, i was a hero.

I’ve learn that setting appropriate incentives is the hardest part of building an effective organization.

LadyCailin• 8 months ago

Click the “undown” button to undo a down vote.

ericd• 8 months ago

You can hit the undown link that shows up?

neilv3• 8 months ago

I had to mention this in an early startup, when I did some firefighting, and the biz people were praising that. I said I wanted to set a culture in which engineering was rewarded for making things just happen and work, not for firefighting.

A nice thing about early startups is that it's the easiest time to try to set engineering culture like this on a good track. Once you start hiring people, they will either cement elements of whatever culture you're setting, or they'll bring a poor culture with them.

(My current understanding, if you find your culture has been corrupted with a clique/wolfpack of mercenary ex-FAANG people, or a bunch of performative sprint theatre seatwarmers, is that you either have to excise/amputate everywhere the cancer has spread, or accept that you're stuck with a shit culture forever.)

CGMthrowaway• 8 months ago

You can downvote submissions?

chanux• 8 months ago

Deep work that's important but does not appear shiny carries an elevated risk of being completely messed up by someone.

"Oh this thing here looks steady and boring. This sure does not need a team of six."

Next thing you know, the thing falls apart, destabilizing everything that stood on it's stability.

avhception• 8 months ago

Basically the Sysadmin's dilemma.

Everything working fine: "What are we paying you for?"

Something broken: "What are we paying you for?"

MyHonestOpinon• 8 months ago

Unfortunately, in this profession we are being lead by managers that do not longer have deep knowledge of how to build good software systems. They can't evaluate contributions in code, so they resort to evaluate participation, and popularity.

As an engineer you are left with a dilema. Either you focus on writing solid code and making your projects move forward or you focus on selling your self to the leadership class.

LPisGood2• 8 months ago

It’s so much easier to sell yourself when you write solid code

etothepii• 8 months ago

An observation here that wasn't quite made but in my opinion is supported by the narrative.

If you raise enough capital (whether social or financial) to run for 3 years then you can run for 3 years. If your bets are paying off 2 years in you can stick with the plan - no one will care how you used the capital in year 1 and 2 if there is a payoff in year 3.

The risk comes from being wrong.

lalitmaganti10• 8 months ago

The risk comes from being wrong.

It's definitely a high risk high reward strategy but if you have the context from being the space for years and you've done your due diligence by speaking to your customers before you build things, you reduce the risk significantly.

Of course the risk can never be zero though and luck definitely played a role in past successes.

bluGill6• 8 months ago

There is another risk: you run for 2 years and prevent a major problem that would bite the company in year 3 or 4. However because the problem never happened nobody knows how much you saved everyone and so you don't replace all that capital you used up.

Every company I've worked for has regular meetings where they honor the people who stayed late to get the release out the door (I work in embedded systems where upgrades often mean flying someone with a USB stick to a remote location without cell service - thus bug free releases are important since upgrades are expensive). I can't help thinking every time that if the rewarded person had just done their job 6 months ago they wouldn't have had the bug in the first place.

potato3732842• 8 months ago

Everyone says the thing they're working on is critically important. Who's right?

More work gets done for less if you wait until the 11th hour and fix the real problems last minute rather than fix everything ahead of time, much of which will turn out to not have needed fixing.

Yeah there's risks involved but at the limit it makes some sense.

thijson• 8 months ago

I guess it takes a visionary management to recognize the value of disasters that were prevented.

Who is worth more? The person that quietly removes scrub brush and other fuel on the ground in the years before the forest fire starts, or the person that comes in once the fire starts and using lots of equipment and effort puts the fire out. Often the latter person gets the accolades, the former is a thankless task.

If a company lacks visionary leaders like that, then one must wonder if the company has much of a future anyway.

dwa3592• 8 months ago

That's sounds very Shakespearean.

RandallBrown• 8 months ago

I forget the exact details, but we had a bug that prevented logging in to the app for a large subset of users.

The engineer that caused the bug ended up staying late and fixing it. He was treated like an absolute hero by management, even though it was his fault in the first place. (Don't worry, we all fully understood it wasn't just his fault. The whole system failed and he wouldn't have been harshly judged for the problem.)

From then on we joked about adding bugs on purpose so that we could all get similar treatment.

throwaway2037• 8 months ago

    > flying someone with a USB stick to a remote location without cell service

Do these places still exist on planet Earth? What equipment were you upgrading? I am so curious.

LinuxAmbulance2• 8 months ago

I get the sense that Lalit wants to do the work and get paid while avoiding the career meta game. The appeal of that is understandable, but having been in this situation in the past, it's not all its cracked up to be.

The number of tech companies where you can stay employed for a solid decade without falling victim to layoffs or re-orgs are very rare in my experience, even more so ones that offer competitive pay.

If you find yourself looking for a new job and want to move up in title and pay, doing the same sort of unglamorous work for years can be a detriment to that.

lalitmaganti10• 8 months ago

It's not that I want to avoid the career metagame (I would argue I haven't so far) but that the career metagame is different depending on your environment.

class3shock• 8 months ago

I know this is off topic but if you ever have the inclination to write about it, I would be really interested in reading about any books, people, experiences, professional lessons learned, etc. that have been helpful to you on progressing along a non-spotlight technical focused engineering path.

I'm in a different domain (aerospace) but am trying to carve out a similar career path and am always looking for more to learn about just being a good engineer.

tanepiper2• 8 months ago

This - I've been very honest with my manager that I won't play "the game" in this organisation - I don't really have to, there is plenty for staff engineers to tackle to have a long career without the yoke of management.

LinuxAmbulance2• 8 months ago

Sure, but Google is a very unique environment and the advice is unlikely to work at the majority of employers.

thiago_fm• 8 months ago

It's easy to write that blogpost when you are in a position of a lot of privilege, in arguably the best software engineering company in the world, and got where you are surely for your competence, but also a high degree of luck.

Some other people has to grind harder and even be better than you to get half of your success, that doesn't mean that they are wrong, or that the book is wrong.

I believe a lot, if not all advice there in the book is necessary. Other people might not work at Google, but as I've said before, might need to grind different gears in order to be successful, if you don't -- good for you!

A lot of your suggestions would get you fired very quickly on many companies, it's good that it all works for you.

lalitmaganti10• 8 months ago

My goal with this post was not to claim this is a universal template to success for everyone but simply sharing an approach that worked for me.

I tried to point out several times that, yes there are places where a "move fast with leadership" approach works better. And yes this only works in the biggest companies capable of sustaining an infra team for a long period of time.

bluGill6• 8 months ago

There are staff level jobs like that in every company. However they are hard to get into. You have to prove yourself constantly and for long enough that the executives trust they can leave you alone and you will solve problems. You here means your team, as a staff engineer you likely have a lot of more junior engineers working under you.

swaits2• 8 months ago

It’s not luck. To assume so, let alone say so, is uninformed and quite rude.

Getting into these roles requires a ton of hard work. Yes, it’s a grind.

If you feel it’s only achievable with luck, I suggest you’re selling yourself short.

WhyOhWhyQ4• 8 months ago

It is a large amount of luck, obviously. You didn't hard-work your way out of brain damage at birth. You didn't hard-work your way into your geographic location which gave you access to the resources that lead you to where you are, which are unavailable most places in the world. You didn't hard-work your way out of avoiding a draft for a war where you got killed at age 18.

palata• 8 months ago

It’s not luck. To assume so, let alone say so, is uninformed and quite rude.

They did not say that. They said it included a high degree of luck. It's easier to get there when you grow up in a country where you have access to a computer, for instance.

If you feel it’s only achievable with luck, I suggest you’re selling yourself short.

It most definitely is only achievable with enough luck: given the same "hard work", not everyone on Earth will get to the same point. I find it amazing how people don't understand that.

It doesn't mean that there was no hard work. Just that "I am here because nobody on Earth would deserve it more and luck has nothing to do with it" is... I don't know... narcissistic?

orwin2• 8 months ago

My brother had an internship in a medium-sized company, and after 6 months, a new product (that he was hired for basically) and 3 new internal tools (including one for reading data trace, which, after reading this, is quite a propos), he was hired as a staff engineer.

I do not have his proactivity for sure, nor I have his ease with other people, but I managed to land my job in an infra/tool for network and security without much difficulties.

eutropia• 8 months ago

As a fellow infrastructure and tooling engineer with a long tenure on one team: this tracks.

You do occasionally get to scoop up the rare low-hanging fruit to get a shiny win that all the engineers appreciate; but for the most part it's chill, professional, satisfying work at a pace that leaves you with enough sanity to raise a family.

bonsai_spool• 8 months ago

If I had followed the advice to “optimize for fungibility” (i.e. if I had switched teams in 2023 to chase a new project) Bigtrace would not exist.

Would a PM be responsible for this sort of broader thinking in a more typical team?

lalitmaganti10• 8 months ago

Would a PM be responsible for this sort of broader thinking in a more typical team?

Good PMs do exactly this in product teams yes. But unfortunately PMs are not immune to shifting priorities and moving around either, just like I describe for engineers. So it's very hard to make it work but the best PMs I know somehow manage anyway!

mh22666• 8 months ago

It’s a little snarky and cynical but I’ve found little use for product managers in infra and devx teams because they typically don’t have the technical background to have relevant product vision and anyone that can make L7+ as an engineer on this sort of team should be able to figure out what the product should be.

This is different in a product team because engineers aren’t the customers, although I’d still argue anyone senior in a product engineering team should still have at least some product sense.

sebstefan• 8 months ago

Being left alone to build your cathedrals is the dream for me. This seems nice.

bluGill6• 8 months ago

You are only left alone if your cathedrals generate enough value while being ignored. The post is about a tools team, so long as the tools work and nobody comes selling a "cheaper tool that solves everything" management doesn't care and you get to work. However if you tools start causing problems for the engineers who use them and the complain to management you are in trouble. If someone else comes along with a "cheaper tool that solves everything" you are in trouble (such tool may or may not be cheaper/better, the point is they can sell management on the idea they are - you didn't successfully defend yours)

Edit: there is one more danger: you do your job well and management thinks you do nothing and so gets rid of you (only to hire a new team in 3 months when everything collapses)

spinity• 8 months ago

You almost shut down my computer，lol

kccqzy• 8 months ago

I cannot agree more. That’s also why personally I strongly prefer to work on infra rather than product teams. You get so much insulation from random whims of the leadership or PMs and you get simply pursue technical excellence. I don’t want to contribute to “visible ‘wins’ of a product launch” at all. I’m happy that I currently work at a medium-sized company (head count between 1k and 10k) that has been around for 30+ years and my work involves quietly improving the infra used by other teams.

notyourday5• 8 months ago

I worked closely with a few during my career in a few companies. It is a retirement plan of people who neither can nor want to perform after they "put in time". These days as someone who gets to give my couple of cents to folks in the upper echelons of promising companies I tell the newly minted CTOs to either not hire them or if they are already hired, fire them.

Staff engineer and above = 45 year old soccer player bench warmer getting the pay 22 year old striker.

giuscri2• 8 months ago

so what one should do after a certain age?

notyourday5• 8 months ago

Continue to perform or live off the savings.

sakopov• 8 months ago

So you suggest firing people based on their title alone? Sounds pretty damn stupid.

notyourday5• 8 months ago

So you suggest firing people based on their title alone? Sounds pretty damn stupid.

You can look through the threads in this comment section and in other comment sections of threads that touched on Staff Engineers and Senior staff engineers. People perfectly illustrate why the companies would do well firing them - people describe that as their dream "retirement" job.

Yes, I suggest firing every single one of them. They are non-performing group eating enormous compensation packages.

dare944• 8 months ago

I read it as saying you should fire someone because of their age. Not stupid, malicious.

grimpy• 8 months ago

This works until your leadership changes.

moralestapia• 8 months ago

spotlight

Literally, who?

dasil0032• 8 months ago

This is a well articulated article and the OA makes some good observations about the differences in evaluation between a product engineering org and an infra engineering org. It's also clear he's got real technical chops to finish a masters degree and then make L7 at Google in just under 8 years, and clearly that doesn't happen without an ability to navigate some level of large org politics.

I will say though, that there is still a good amount of naivete in the reasoning presented. The bottom line is that these generalizations and rationalizations are based on a single vary large company and implicitly dependent on the viewpoint and priorities of a bunch of VPs and executives whose mental model may or may not align with how you see the world in the infra trenches. Now Google is an engineering-driven culture, so the author is probably not too far off, but it also represents a particular time and place. Google has enjoyed one of the strongest and most profitable market positions that was cemented years before he entered the work force, and so there's a level of comfort and sheltered existence that infra teams at most companies do not enjoy. Make hay during the good times, but always be aware leaderships attitudes and priorities can change very quickly due to market or investor pressure, and at that point you need to be ready to adapt and articulate your value in a new environment of greater scrutiny, or to a new company (in the case of layoffs).

thundergolfer• 8 months ago

Did you read the full post? The author addressed these points at the end. They’re not naive.

lalitmaganti10• 8 months ago

I'm very well aware of the privilege afforded to me by my company and the time I'm working in. I tried to emphasize in the post several times that this is not a "universal guide to success" and that in other companies or teams, a different approach and strategy might be needed.

The whole reason I wrote this post at all was, with the success of Sean's work on HN recently, I felt people were leaning too far into the direction of "you need to constantly move around and go where the exec attention is". I just wanted to show that, from my singular experience, it is possible to carve out a different path in some positions while still being ambitious and "successful" (for some definition of success).

dasil0032• 8 months ago

Yeah sorry if my assessment was a bit callous and overly critical, and I hope you don't take it personally. I meant what I said up front that it was very well articulated and made a lot of sense.

The reason I wrote what I wrote is because I came into the industry in the year 2000, and multiple times throughout my career experienced a rug pull of my own mental model of my value as a software engineer. It's very painful and something that I think ICs in deep-thinking professions like software are very vulnerable to.

postit• 8 months ago

One thing I’ve learned in my 25+ year career is that if you don't own your narrative and your work, someone else will claim it - especially in corporate America.

I have lost count of the brilliant engineers who were passed over for credit simply because someone less technically capable, but extremely popular, pulled the strings to steal the spotlight.

You don't necessarily need to be in the spotlight, but you do need to leave a paper trail. Claim your work and inventions both internally and externally. You don't need to be a 'LinkedIn thought leader' to do this, just submit talks to conferences and find peers at other companies who understand the difference between those who build and those who only talk about building.

proc03• 8 months ago

This is one of the main reasons I'm trying to pivot away from a career inside a corporate environment. There is too much politics. I wish it was just do the work and go home, and get rewarded for the work that was completed, but instead there is a huge self-promotion (as in marketing) component. If that's what it takes I might as well do something that I own and control. If I'm going to need to worry about how to market my own work then I might as well try and at least not have a boss. I always thought the point of being an employee and having a limited paycheck meant that you don't worry about this things. That's the fair tradeoff.

jeffwass• 8 months ago

To be fair, this issue isn’t endemic only to big companies. I’ve seen similar even in academia, some people just know how to “play the game” and play it very well.

It really depends on the culture of where you are, which can even vary team by team in the same org.

goalieca2• 8 months ago

There’s too much emphasis on career growth into leadership. I know so many programmers who simply want to solve the trickiest of technical problems, do good work they can feel proud of, and go home to their families. They want stability more than anything.

pixl972• 8 months ago

meant that you don't worry about this things

Not at all, that was a confused expectation.

The problem here, at least I think, is you may be very unaware of the expectations of running ones own business. There are far more politics, more being cutthroat, tons of regulations you must be aware of that come with potential later penalties if you are not, legal threats, and more.

stack_framer• 8 months ago

This is exactly how I feel.

I recently spent 30 months trying to qualify for a promotion, earnestly striving to demonstrate that I could operate at the staff engineer level. I accepted literally every single opportunity, offered by my manager and director of engineering, to take on extra work and show that I'm staff caliber. They were both eventually persuaded that I was ready, so they authored an 18-page "promotion packet" touting my many accomplishments—the marketing component you describe. This document was then presented to an anonymous promotion committee who, after two weeks of consideration, rejected my promotion.

I am now channeling every ounce of my energy toward becoming my own boss. They have unwittingly started an unquenchable fire in me, and I eagerly await the day I can tender my resignation and tell them just how much they didn't deserve me.

notarobot123• 8 months ago

It's pretty demoralizing to realize that appearances matter more than merit in careers/politics/dating/business/etc. The pragmatic approach is to not give up on merit but not neglect appearances either.

Still, the idealist in me hates this. It feels like quality should win out over advertising yet it rarely does in the grand scheme of things.

lotsofpulp2• 8 months ago

That is because time and energy are limited resources, and measuring merit accurately is very costly. Measuring appearance is far less costly, and might serve as an acceptable proxy. And often times it might not.

FromTheFirstIn2• 8 months ago

There’s rarely (maybe never) an objective and comprehensive measure of quality. Your concept of what merits matter is someone else’s advertising. No one is operating non-meritocratically, they just value different qualities from you.

lumost• 8 months ago

this is the biggest benefit of 1:1's in my opinion.

Often, individuals can claim credit simply by being first and loudest. For example, and individual can highlight a problem area that someone is already working on in the team and loudly talk about the flaws in the current approach and how they will solve it. The individual need not actually solve the task if the first person finishes - but now the success is subconsciously attributed to the thought leadership/approach of the new individual.

Good managers/leadership teams have mechanisms to limit this type of strategy, but it requires them to talk to everyone on the team - listen for unsaid feedback and look at hard artifacts. Otherwise you quickly have a team of people who are great at nothing more than talking about problems and dreaming of solutions.

cactus2093• 8 months ago

I've always kind of expected it to work this way, with people being cutthroat and stealing credit for other people's work.

What I have seen in reality is a lot more nuanced. There are a lot of good ideas that will simply die if nobody pitches them the right way, i.e. if no one gets the rest of the team/org/company to understand and agree that it solves an important problem.

There are also very few novel ideas in a mature business or technology space. Every time I think I've come up with one, I search the internal company docs and often someone had mentioned the same thing 5 years ago in some long-forgotten design doc or something.

I've come to realize that the hard thing and the bottleneck for a good idea to have real impact is not the idea itself or the execution, it's pulling the right strings to make space for the idea and get it accepted. At a small scale, in your own team or ownership domain, this isn't necessary and you can just build things and let the results speak for themselves. But the amount of impact that thing has on the broader company will be limited if you don't pull the strings the right way.

Some people despise this idea and in that case, a big company is probably not the right place for you. But most of the cases I've seen of "brilliant engineers passed over for credit" were people not realizing and not doing this necessary part of the job. If someone else steps in and gets the idea more widely recognized after you had let it stall and moved onto the next thing, then 1. usually you do still some partial recognition for it so it's a win/win and 2. the other person is not really stealing credit, because if they had done nothing the idea would have just died and you wouldn't have gotten credit anyway.

alephnerd5• 8 months ago

You can own the narrative while also not being in the spotlight.

At the end of the day, only a handful of stakeholders matter in any organization. So long as you can promote you and your team's initiatives to your manager, your skip manager, and a couple key members of Product, Sales, Customer Success, and Leadership - your place is secure.

In fact, in most cases I would say a mass spotlight is actually a net negative, because it only increases the risk that someone might view you as a potential competitor for either budget or responsibility.

So long as you remain aligned to the business's stated goals for the year and can communicate that to the relevant subsegment of stakeholders, a massive spotlight is unnecessary.

nostrademons• 8 months ago

So I'm not sure about this, particularly in the context of this article. I think it definitely applies to the splashy, Spotlight, one-off projects that will make a career with one shot. But a lot of careers aren't made that way, and this article is specifically talking about the ones that aren't.

I've found that trust is a currency in a corporate environment, possibly the most important one. And trust is built over time. If you work behind the scenes to ensure the success of a project but don't claim it, there's a decent chance somebody else will, and maybe it'll appear in their promo packet. But if you are in the vicinity of enough successful projects, over a long period of time, there's a good chance that leadership will notice that the common element is you. And in the process you'll built up a good reputation and network, so even if leadership gets replaced there are lots of other people that want to work with you. Promotions come slower at first, but they eventually catch up since you don't need to suffer the resets of failed projects and new roles.

rockinghigh• 8 months ago

As you suggested, promotions tend to come more slowly. You're also likely to hit a lower ceiling than someone who is better at promoting their work.

1dom• 8 months ago

But if you are in the vicinity of enough successful projects, over a long period of time, there's a good chance that leadership will notice that the common element is you.

This is only true if average tenure of leadership and management is more than a couple of years.

WhyOhWhyQ4• 8 months ago

That's how it works for every organization. Not just corporate America. Want to play on the varsity baseball team? Better be popular with the coaches and other players. Otherwise you're on the bench keeping score. Want to go to Harvard grad school? Better be the right kind of popular. Want to be celebrated in machine learning? Better be popular by doing shallow work on lots of projects. The whole world is a scam, and the scammers always win.

TimByte5• 8 months ago

But calling the whole world a scam feels like letting the worst parts define the whole yet it can feel like the game is rigged in favor of the loudest or most connected

zeroonetwothree• 8 months ago

It works that way sometimes but I have found that merit and skill does get rewarded. The best case is when you have both.

SoftTalker3• 8 months ago

There's an exception though if you're truly good. If you can hit home runs or throw a baseball with laser accuracy and speed you will be on the varsity team even if you're an introverted social misfit. You might not be team captain but bottom line is the coach wants players who can win games, not be prom king.

mh22666• 8 months ago

I don’t think being popular with the players is entirely irrelevant for players in team sports. Locker room cohesion matters.

bdangubic• 8 months ago

with all due respect, every word you wrote is wrong. michael jordan was and still is biggest a-hole that every teammate hated - the best to ever do it. getting into harvard - nothing to do with popularity. mom&pop alumni perhaps or you can just be a great student, I know several harvard grads who are about as popular as wahington generals. machine learning - most celebrated are ones pulling 7-8-figure salaries no one has ever heard of (I’ve heard of one through a colleague).

anonymars• 8 months ago

I don't think it's a scam, I think all too often people forget that people don't just automatically know things that are going on. It's an important life lesson: telling the story is as important as taking the action. "If you build it, they will come" is bunk

Marketing, publicity, networking, call it what you will. If no one knows a feature is in your app, it doesn't matter how good it is. You see this in politics too. That's why you have those signs on the road saying "your tax dollars at work"

I bet you can think of any number of poorly publicized success stories that didn't get the credit they deserved, or became victims of the invisibility of their success

FromTheFirstIn2• 8 months ago

I think your definition of popular is holding you back. If popular just means other people like you, you’re obviously wrong- plenty of people are very successful even though they are disliked. Often this will happen multiple times on a single team at a company. If popular means you’re perceived as valuable, you’re obviously right. All institutions are social institutions and operate on social understandings of value. So to be successful you have to be perceived as valuable by these social structures. I think calling this a scam misunderstands the non-quantitative metrics of worth. There isn’t actually a Best Academic, a Best Engineer, or a Best Coworker in some measurable objective sense. Those are all social evaluations and they’re valuable because of that, not despite it

Libidinalecon• 8 months ago

This is completely delusional lol.

No one that played high school sports can possibly believe this.

Everyone knows by day two who the gifted players are, who is average and who sucks. The good players are never bench warmers because everyone wants to win.

The world is made up of a bunch of average people by definition but there is a percentage of those average people that think they are gifted when they are not.

Then they blame the world for not understanding their "genius".

The most brilliant person I know dropped out of medical school and just raced up the corporate ladder. It took her about 2 months in any role for management to see she should move up. Myself on the other hand have had to really grind it out, constantly learning and networking to improve my luck because I am just so very average.

reactordev• 8 months ago

It shouldn’t be this way. Merit should be the metric. But it’s true. No matter how good or bad your numbers are, if Bob likes you, you’re good.

Keep polishing those soft skills and if you have a face only your mother would love, be a writer… but get your voice out there.

TimByte5• 8 months ago

You don't have to self-promote aggressively, but you do have to advocate for your work

venturecruelty4• 8 months ago

Personally, I don't care. Pay me and leave me the hell alone. We get 80 short years on this beautiful blue marble, if we're exceedingly lucky, and I refuse to spend one red second of that playing stupid games to excel in a sclerotic economic system that didn't even exist until very recently.

So I'm going to continue to try to grind it out as best as I can, while spending time on the things that actually matter: music, art, making delicious food for me and my friends, my hobbies, my family, my local community. Corporate America is bereft of joy and meaning anyway. Maybe it makes me some sort of sucker, but I don't care. I'd rather live.

mbajkowski• 8 months ago

Seems to me you have your Life Razor, per Sahil Bloom, pretty much in place for your current stage in life

anon7725• 8 months ago

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

bird0861• 8 months ago

You seem like the type of coworker I would accept less pay to work with. Actually at a crossroads right now, did my research on my prospects and have narrowed it down to two places I most expect to be surrounded by good coworkers and managers. Cheers.

agentultra• 8 months ago

This has happened to me several times!

Hamming, in his book The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, also encourages this.

But the last edition was in 1994 and he was writing from the position of having worked at Bell Labs for most of his career. We don’t really have that these days.

It’s great if you can find a way to be a non-fungible developer. I think part of the strategy is taking the spotlight and managing perceptions of your work. You don’t get to choose what you work on most of the time but you can make sure that it’s visible and useful.

As the author suggests, and I think I aspire to myself, is building good tools and libraries that people appreciate and depend on.

hedayet• 8 months ago

I can think of a couple of times when I wasn’t the best at something, yet still got opportunities simply because someone well-established in that space liked me.

And I can think of the opposite too - situations where I was at a disadvantage because someone higher up just didn’t like me.

For me, it’s more or less balanced at a balance at this point of time. But most people around me, I don’t think they’ve been as lucky.

ergocoder2• 8 months ago

Working at FAANG kinda bypasses this once you reach the "rest & vest" phrase. It's like whatever I don't give a fuck. I've met tons of them. They don't care about credits because they've earned so much.

oatlgr• 8 months ago

This hits close to home. I'm UK-based remote working for a US company, and I've seen this play out more times than I'd like. Led the architecture and design on products that went on to do $100m+, only for someone else to waltz in and take the credit once I'd moved on to the next thing. The annoying bit is that being good at your job often means you get dragged into the next hard problem before the last one's had its moment. Meanwhile, whoever happens to be standing there when the champagne corks pop gets all the credit. The paper trail advice is bang on. I'd just add - document decisions as you make them, not after the fact. Architecture decision records, design docs with your name on them, commit histories that tell the story. Handy when people's memories start getting conveniently fuzzy.

trjordan• 8 months ago

This is a really good article. Don't get caught up in the tone of "anti-politics" or "slow is good." It's describing a brand of politics and impact that is just as mercurial as product development if you do it wrong. Infra and DevEx behaves fundamentally differently, and it can be a really great path if it suites your personality.

For context: my last job was PM for the infra team at Slack. I did it for 5 years. I didn't learn about Slack's product launch process until year 4. Everything until that point was internal work, on our k8s/service mesh and DB infrastructure.

The important insight here is about customer success and shadow management. Every successful engineer (and my own success) derived from figuring out what product engineers needed and delivering it. The "Shadow Hierarchy" feedback was make-or-break for those promotions. It's _hard_ to optimize for that, because you need to seek that feedback, understand if addressing it will actually fix the problem, and deliver it quickly enough to matter in the product org.

If you're willing to optimize for that internal success, you'll be rewarded, but in your career and in stability in the organization. I disagree this is only at Big Tech -- companies as small as 100 engineers have real and strong cultures in the right team, under the right manager.

But don't think this is some magical cheat code to ignoring what's important to the business. It's just a different, perhaps more palatable, route to managing the alignment and politics that are a necessary part of growth at any company.

TimByte5• 8 months ago

I've seen the same dynamics play out at mid-sized companies

Quothling• 8 months ago

I agree with the author in regards to it being different career paths, but I think your take is better and more nuanced. I've done both. I started my career being a spotlight engineer, quickly advancing the ranks and being sent on a educational path for leadership. I didn't like it though. Don't get me wrong. I basked in the glory for the first year, but then when it got to be just a regular day, I really started to miss solving what I see as interesting problems. Which is often working on stability and safety, building tools and infrastructure which makes it easier for other people to serve the business.

Maybe it's because I've done the spotlight thing, but I don't really care about praise from management anymore. In fact I suspect that most of my direct managers have never really known what I did, but since they've seen the impact for other people, it's not really been an issue in regards to my reviews or pay. I don't get a lot of credit and I don't get a lot of praise. I don't necessarily see someone who's build a great product with the tools I've made as stealing my credit either. That's sort of the point of what I do.

I completely agree with you that this is not just Big Tech, or Enterprise or even in organisations that are focused on Tech. I also agree that it's not about ignoring the business, you're still going to want to build things that are useful. You're still going to do change management from the ground up to make sure people know the tools are useful and how to use them. You're still going to network and be friendly with your co-workers.

What you can skip is a lot of the corporate politics and frankly most of the "financial" information. I don't even think the price is very high, you don't get the publicity, but it's not like spotlight engineers necessarily get better pay or better career paths unless they want to go into management.

tanepiper2• 8 months ago

This article resonated a lot with me - I have a 25+ year career and until my most recent role I'd usually switch companies every 2 years.

My current company I'm now on year 4, and 3rd year leading a team building an internal platform for the business - for me it is a dream role - management mostly stay out the way, strategy comes from top down but our team make all the decisions, and after a slow start it's now paying off with several teams using us and helping drive through real requirements, and not the imagined ones from a few execs.

This has lead to constant positive feedback from all of our 'customers' who would never have been able to consider running their own content delivery pipelines - we're solving their real problems. Regardless of any politics, this is what gives me the energy to turn up every day.

TimByte5• 8 months ago

That kind of bottom-up traction feels rare, but when it happens, it's incredibly energizing

TimByte5• 8 months ago

The long-game of quiet impact: context accumulation, trust-building, and systems thinking

GMoromisato• 8 months ago

There are downsides to this approach, however.

If your team is not critical, at least in the eyes of upper-management, then you'll be first on the chopping block in the next downturn.

But if you are critical--say, running critical but unsexy infrastructure--then it's all downside risk with no upside. If things work, they ignore you, but if they mess up, you get the blame and the spotlight.

As with any business/career advice, there are no silver bullets, only trade-offs.

mh22666• 8 months ago

This completely matches my experience as an infra principal engineer in a coding archetype at another big company. I do impactful and good technical work and always try to defer credit to those “under” me even if it was my idea they are implementing. As long as my manager knows it was my idea everything works out fine.

That being said you do kind of end up in the spotlight anyways but it feels very different to do it through reputation of knowledge and technical competence rather than through PR-like selling.

dbacar• 8 months ago

You dont have to be at google or zoogle to witness these, even be an engineer.

People are people.

froggertoaster• 8 months ago

Ignoring the spotlight is detrimental.

As a person who does consulting work, the best thing I've found I can do is stay visible with my accomplishments.

I did a presentation earlier this year for a client where the CEO was in attendance. I did not know he was going to be there. They were blown away by my presentation.

You make your own luck.

raw_anon_11117• 8 months ago

I am not criticizing the author or his opinion in any way. But what he didn’t emphasize enough that yes he might ignore the spotlight as a staff engineer. But he can only do so because he is a staff software engineer.

When I was working at a startup from 2018-2020, I was hired as the second technical hire by then new CTO who was tasked to bring tech leadership into the company from an outside consulting agency where all of the long term developers were in India.

They were constantly seeking the spotlight to insure they kept their jobs. I could afford to not seek the spotlight. I already had the trust of the owners, CTO etc. I had no fear of being made redundant because the right people didn’t know what I contributed.

I wasn’t trying to get a promotion, I was already leading all of the big technical cross functional initiatives as the company grew.

On the other hand, when I got into BigTech in 2020 as an L5 (Professional Services consulting not SDE), I saw for the first time how much politics played in getting ahead. I personally didn’t care. My goal from day 1 was to make money and leave after 4 years. I was already 46 and knew I didn’t want to stay long term.

But I did see how hard it was for a damn good intern I mentored their senior year and when they came back to get noticed. I had to create opportunities for them to get noticed because they were ignored by their manager [1]. They still had to change departments to just get a chance to get on a promotion track.

I see it again on the other side. I would hate to have to play the games and go through the gauntlet to get promoted at the company I work at now and where I was brought in at the staff level.

But I would be chasing after the spotlight with the best of them to get ahead.

I do have the luxury to not chase recognition - everyone who is important already knows me and what I do. My projects automatically give me visibility without my chasing them.

[1] all of the early career people reported to a separate manager and were loaned out to teams.

lalitmaganti10• 8 months ago

But he can only do so because he is a staff software engineer.

I don't agree with this at all. This is how I've worked for my entire time at Google, all the way from new grad L3 joining the company till today. Ignoring the spotlight does not mean "don't get attention from other people" but "don't chase the project execs are focusing on".

Whenever I've work on a project, I make a very active effort to make sure engineers are aware of it, especially if I think they would find it useful. But that's different than going to my execs and asking "what's the highest priority at the moment" and working on that.

raw_anon_11117• 8 months ago

And how does that look on your promo doc?

Would you rather be working on some obscure internal website for employees to track their performance that no one cares about or something related to Google ads? Which would you suggest a new grad work on?

It sounds cynical. But I never personal tried to get ahead at BigTech, it was never my goal, I just saw the struggles that others had navigating the promo process from L4 (entry level) -> L5 and L6->L7. It seemed like L5->L6 was the easiest for some reason.

jrochkind1• 8 months ago

Stewardship, staying with a system long-term, unlocks compounding returns that are impossible to achieve on a short rotation.

This is not just true of developer tools, but I think all projects and products.

It's a big problem that many parts of our industry are essentially optimized against this happening.

mooreds• 8 months ago

Great post. Also a reminder that there isn't one career path for everyone.

The thing that is most interesting to me as someone who works at a devtool company is how this puts a spotlight on what vendors can offer (and what they can't). Every time you integrate a devtool into your product, you are trusting that they've thought out and gone through the deep process work of stewardship.

rconti• 8 months ago

Can confirm. I've worked on infra teams for decades, at companies from 80-80,000 people, and I don't think I've _ever_ had a PM on a project I worked on.

EDIT: Note, this is not _necessarily_ a complaint, although I think they would have been very helpful in some circumstances. My main misgivings in working with PM orgs is when they treat my projects as a necessary evil input to the success of the projects they care about. So you get all of the hectoring and demands of professional management with none of the help.

nitwit0054• 8 months ago

Google is an unusual environment for internal tools. A lot of companies will build things, and then starve them of funding and engineers, as they aren't part of any of the top company priorities.

This often means building tools comes with a penalty. People will keep reaching out to you for help, because there is no one else.

alephnerd5• 8 months ago

Priorities only become priorities because people fought for them to become priorities.

You can fight that battle via significant self promotion, but you can also lobby for yourself by keeping in constant contact with a subset of stakeholders who actually matter (your manager, your skip manager, your PM, your PM's manager, and maybe 1-2 adjacent EMs).

And honestly, the latter is the norm and much easier as well simply because it ensures that other people are fighting your battle.

nitwit0054• 8 months ago

Well, no, the priorities are often whatever the CEO thinks they are right now.

People have to be open to being convinced. It'd be nice if that was always true, but it's clearly not always the case.

nsxwolf• 8 months ago

There's also another path to staying out of the spotlight - when you've been under the spotlight a couple times and got no reward at all from it.

GrumpyGoblin• 8 months ago

Meh. Good article but not sure it's globally relevant.

Spotlight is about personality. Some people are visible, outspoken, and in the spotlight, and impactful. Others are quiet, subdued, behind the scenes but impactful. Some of the best developers I've known have been on either end of the spectrum.

At the end of the day it's about impact. When the quiet guy gets the job done every time, people still notice. When the loud guy doesn't, people notice even more.

Sure, there are cases where one guy screams from the mountaintops about how much he has done and gets promoted. And there are cases where the quiet guy gets passed over no matter how well he does. But these always wash in the end unless you work for a supremely shitty company. And even then they tend to work themselves out in life eventually. Even if it sucks for the people involved at the time.

Impact is the name of the game. Loud or quiet is irrelevant.

striglia• 8 months ago

I find this infra perspective so fascinating, as a career-long product platform engineer and solidly staff+. I don't argue that sean's writing (which is amazing) is a little overly mercenary in framing, but I'll pick a few choice sections I don't agree with here too. tldr I think the "product cares about speed; infra cares about leverage" staff engineer archetype is a false dichotomy we shouldn't encourage.

"In the product environments Sean describes, where goals pivot quarterly and features are often experimental, speed is the ultimate currency. You need to ship, iterate, and often move on before the market shifts." -- I disagree that speed is the ultimate currency! A great product org also respects long term leverage, it's just _always_ harder to argue for. But it's best to build a strong portfolio of going fast (where needed), going slow (where high leverage), and if everyone agrees your "going slow" led to huge returns you get the best of all worlds. Frankly it's a sign of a relatively junior product engineer if they are myopically focused on speed at the cost of all else.

"But the more powerful return is systemic innovation. If you rotate teams every year, you are limited to solving acute bugs that are visible right now. Some problems, however, only reveal their shape over long horizons." -- Extremely true, and this is _equally or more true_ in product domains. My most valuable contributions have come from sitting in a product area long enough to generalize 5 micro optimizations into the macro engineering leverage we needed to drive an order of magnitude more value from the same engineering input.

"For some engineers, navigating this [high visibility driven] chaos is a thrill. For those of us who care about system stability, it feels like a trap." -- my protip for prospective staff engineers is to _never_ say you only care about [speed, stability]. In most cases you must care about both, and it's worth advertising yourself as such. If you self select out of companies that only care about [pure stability/pure ship velocity] there should be a valuable balance to strike and staff engineers are in a unique place to enshrine that balance in engineered systems.

"In a product organization, you often need to impress your manager’s manager. In an infrastructure organization, you need to impress your customers’ managers." -- surely we can agree impressing customer stakeholders is even more important in (healthy) product orgs :) But it's a curious claim!

Great article, wonderful to hear more nuanced and deep discussion of the practice of extremely senior IC engineering. Kudos!

lalitmaganti10• 8 months ago

Firstly, thanks for the thoughtful comments across the post. Really happy you found it insightful!

But it's best to build a strong portfolio of going fast (where needed), going slow (where high leverage), and if everyone agrees your "going slow" led to huge returns you get the best of all worlds.

I guess maybe I oversold this a little in the post but I definitely think that product orgs value speed more than infra orgs: there's often an mismatch when I speak to product engineers on how fast they expect us to build things for them vs how fast we can actually go while considering all our other customers and not breaking other usecases.

my protip for prospective staff engineers is to _never_ say you only care about [speed, stability]

Fully agreed, both are important for engineers to have. As above, I think the relative composition of them varies though depending on the area (just pulling numbers from the top of my head, maybe it's 70/30 in favor of speed in product orgs, 30/70 in favor of stability in infra orgs).

surely we can agree impressing customer stakeholders is even more important in (healthy) product orgs

You're absolutely right for what I say in the post; reflecting I think I maybe did not go into this topic in enough detail for the nuance it deserves (but the post already felt long enough!).

Let's split the discussion into 3 different areas (as IMO they each work slightly different): infra/devex, B2C and B2B.

* Infra/devex: as I say in the post, it's critical to impress your other team's managers as that's how you prove impact.

* B2C: your customers are consumers so it's all MAUs, revenue etc. There is no "customer stakeholder" who will give you direct feedback for your promo packet

* B2B: here's where it gets interesting. So if your management chain is directly able to talk to customers (and especially senior managers) to solicit feedback without middle layers (parter manager, account managers, PMs) then yes you're absolutely correct. But often this is not the case: the middle layers act as a filtering point so you get only a fuzzy sense of how stakeholders in the other company about a specific technical thing you worked on. So again it's sort of at the whim of how your manager feels the other company's managers feels.

The basic point I was trying to make is that if you're working on external facing product, from my understanding, even if you impress your external stakeholders, it's not like in your promo packet you can attribute concrete quotes to the customers. quotes like "we couldn't have done X in our company without the work of Y engineer in your org who worked on Z". Whereas this sort of quote is extremely common to see in infra promo packets.

Hope this made sense, I'm not sure I communicated this last point well!

vcbueger• 8 months ago

My voice will likely get lost in the wilderness, but I think it’s a bad sign if you have to write or vibe a whole post like this to defend your worth against another engineer.

I understand from a good chunk of my career that the person on the team that promotes themself and/or has the highest charisma and is adequately intelligent will exceed over others on the team that may work harder, have more experience, and/or is doing more important work for the business.

But it doesn’t mean that you have to ladder climb and play the game to get what you deserve. You can, and maybe can make more money and survive longer that way.

More important than that though is to be yourself. Don’t spend all that time promoting yourself just to make the world a shittier place, so that you get the nice house and car with the kids at the best school, etc. It’s ok to be stepped over while you actually do your job, and for you to feel like shit and maybe be jaded a bit because some asshole that doesn’t deserve it is getting the spotlight. Someone needs to be the Woz. (That’s not a slight against Jobs, btw.)

I ignore the spotlight as a staff engineer

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