And somewhat belatedly the slides I presented at the Ruby User Group Berlin February meetup almost 2 weeks ago 😅 I’ve been extremely busy, so sorry for the delay.
“Going Staff” seems to have been one of my most anticipated talks as it’s an interesting topic that is still only picking up. It’s also a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about and that I’m also extremely passionate bout. A 7 page “draft mixed with outline TODO” blog post (more like mini book) is still in my Google drive on the topic. Sadly, there is no recording of the talk and my slides usually lose ~95% of their value without me speaking alongside them. However, I thought I’d still share them. Maybe I’ll get it into a conference so I can share a recording at a later point!
If you want to learn more in the mean time, “The Staff Engineer’s Path” by Tanya Reilly is a very warm recommendation from my side for everyone in engineering – not just staff engineers or those who want to become Staff+ engineers. It does a wonderful job of showcasing the ambiguities and challenges I’ve dealt with on the job & in technical leadership of organizations as a whole.
You can find the slides on speakerdeck, slideshare or download the PDF.
Abstract
What’s up with becoming a Staff Engineer? What does it mean? Is it just for people who want to keep coding? How do you become a Staff Engineer and what does the work entail? What if I told you, that being a Staff engineer actually required a lot of communication and collaboration skills?
In this talk, let’s answer all those questions – as it’s still quite fuzzy what a Staff engineer actually is.
Journeys of a not so young anymore Software Engineer 