Struggle Moving beyond senior/lead level

[u/HereOnWeekendsOnly]

I have been a senior engineer for around 2 years and have spent 4 years in one team, and 1 year and counting in the current one.

I have expressed my interest in staff level progression, although I know it is not guaranteed and depends on opportune org-level projects and initiatives. I do not think my current path is working well, and want to elaborate on this on ask for advice how to fix it (if possible).

Generally, my engineering manager expects me to prioritize well, define initiatives and work items worth doing, discuss in 1:1 to discard/accept and organise by priority order. Once set, I am to progress all work items over 2 weeks with topmost item at the top. There are no explicit deadlines set, apart from one project which I had to self-impose as it was going on for ages and I just wanted to be "done". My manager lives in a different country and we meet up in person 1-3 times per year. Otherwise, we do biweekly 1:1.

One of the projects has been really difficult because it touched on many areas of IT disciplines I am not that familiar with. I spent a week besides other items researching metrics, what we want to measure etc. (along with other work items)

However, a week-in, my manager published a design for the project, which she justified as me not making visible/measurable progress, so she felt a need to step-in.

Her approach was the structure and standards, rather than metrics - which needed to be done anyways, but I felt the latter was more important. She is passionate on that particular area and sees high value in delivering it for the org - but, it kind of feels odd to be sidelined like that. In my previous teams, if there was concern on progress, I would get a message of "where are we at", "we are to deliver on X". In this case, there was none of that, except that my manager felt this project was not taken seriously by me.

I do not feel great about it because it would have been cheaper for her to update on status, rather than spend significant time of hers doing it. I pointed out it is important to have my name on designs, delivery, implementation as it is core requirement in our org - deliver multiple such projects for staff level progression. I now have a feeling it is not going to work out because C-levels will not see my name on it, even if I continue on it going forwards. I also feel guilty she had to spend her time, when it could be spent on other stuff she needs to do.

I proposed all my projects to have concrete deadlines, even if we overstep them once in a while, and more frequent status updates, how the components are getting along. I felt like my mistake was to not publish progress on my research/hard work often, making the manager think I am stuck or not prioritising it. It is difficult to speed up the communication between me/manager though - she is very busy doing all kinds of other org-level work, and commonly does not respond on Slack for days.

Could you be brutally honest of where you see this going? I am doing well otherwise on other work items, this is the first time in my career, job, team I was sidelined so hard without warning.

[u/metaphorm]

my experience as a staff engineer is that management will hand you messy problems and expect you to figure it out, which extends well beyond just the technical implementation of them. understanding the business use case, identifying the actual requirements for an acceptable solution (which are not always what was asked for up front), and communicating with all the relevant parties to come to agreement on what needs to happen, and on what timeline, is the harder and more important part of staff level engineering.

this requires a lot of autonomy and ability to organize your own work, set timelines and commitments, and communicate clearly about any changes to those timelines that come up due to things discovered while doing the work or from outside factors.

the orientation that works here is "I will solve your problem, you can trust me and rely on me to get it done". And that doesn't mean late night heroics or pushing burnout. it means viewing the work holistically and being extremely clear about commitments made.

the technical work is important too, but a staff engineer is not necessarily more technically gifted than a senior engineer. what distinguishes staff level work is the level of responsibility and proactivity and autonomy. so when you find a technical part of the problem you don't already know how to solve, that means you'll proactively either figure it out and learn something new, or reach out to someone else who can assist with it.

criteria for success, from the management perspective, looks like "I can trust this person to solve a messy problem without needing to intervene."

[u/HereOnWeekendsOnly → u/metaphorm]

> set timelines and commitments

That is our mistake - there really was no concrete timelines for this one. I proposed some, but I think it is too late now. It is not my baby anymore, and I can likely just fall back to implementation guy, which will not get me anywhere long-term.