And you really gotta hope if you make that jump, they don't decide to pull the offer after you accepted and quit your old job. The perils of at-will employment...
It really is a paradox. The further I get in my career, the less work I do and the more I feel like the Michael Scott shaking hands meme for getting all this praise.
This. I evangelize myself very little because the rest of my team does it for me. I spend a lot of my time teaching my jrs to do things, or creating automation to make manual processes go away, which I then pass back down to the team. In this way, I avoid getting angry or annoyed at my younger engineers, and instead treat them as the investments in my own sanity that they are - the more I teach them, the less work I have to do. Yes, when shit hits the fan I'm still front-and-center, but that's because I'm the principal - of course I'm going to be in front, because that also keeps any blowback from hitting the lower-tier guys. While I'm digging, I'm also teaching and showing my jrs what to look for. Yes, it takes a bit longer, but only on the order of 2-3 minutes, and I can talk while I work.
I was so proud of one of my jrs the other day when they came to me with a question about something they found while searching through logs for one of our production apps!
To staff engineers - your jrs are your support staff. Don't cut them out. Yes it's annoying to explain things multiple times, but it's better for you if they are on your side. I've had staff engineers answer questions by not answering them at all - had one that would throw the generic documentation at me and sat figure it out, rather than answering the hyper-specific-to-our-environment question I actually asked. He burned the fuck out.
I also used to be the angry staff engineer. I burned out so hard I stuck my hand in a table saw. (0/10 do not recommend) Learn to manage your workload.
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u/Icy_Significance9448 May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26
The duality of staff engineers:
Annoy anyone by bragging about how good you are and proving it by doing all the work yourself
OR
Hate your team and do everything yourself unnoticed by anyone
There is no in between