The Staff Engineer's Path

A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change

By: Tanya Reilly

Narrated by: Wendy Tremont King

For years, companies have rewarded their most effective engineers with management positions. But treating management as the default path for an engineer with leadership ability doesn't serve the industry well—or the engineer. The staff engineer's path allows engineers to contribute at a high level as role models, driving big projects, determining technical strategy, and raising everyone's skills.

This in-depth book shows you how to understand your role, manage your time, master strategic thinking, and set the standard for technical work. You'll learn about how to be a leader without direct authority, how to plan ahead to make the right technical decisions, and how to make everyone around you better, while still growing as an expert in your domain.

By exploring the three pillars of a staff engineer's job, Tanya Reilly, a veteran of the staff engineer track, shows you how to:

- Take a broad, strategic view when thinking about your work

- Dive into practical tactics for making projects succeed

- Determine what "good engineering" means in your organization

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2022 Tanya Reilly (P)2023 Ascent Audio

Guideline I wish someone told me

Amazing collections of anecdotes from distinguished figures in the industry, along with general advice and examples on how to navigate different staff career paths. Much of the advice in this book could be helpful even for early-career engineers.

I needed this book about 10 years ago.

This book explains to a professional technologist how to get stuff done and function in an organization of people, how to deal with the human factors that often seem at odds with technical and professional goals.

Excellent Book

This book provides some excellent advice for engineers looking to transition to a staff engineering role and for engineers already in that position. I highly recommend it.

The ultimate guidebook for Staff Engineers.

While waiting for an audiobook, I wondered how similar it would be to Will Larson's "Staff Engineer". It turns out, it's a completely different book. While Will provides a good understanding and a high-level overview of the role, Tanya delves into the daily challenges and offers solutions to those problems. To add a bit more: it's absolutely packed with tips and advice. Given my reading approach, I anticipate at least 3-4 re-reads to fully grasp all the insights.

Don’t miss out

Might be the best technical book currently out there. Occasionally awkward as an audio book, so I just bought a paper copy to use as a reference. Better career advice than I’ve gotten from all my managers combined over a 20 year career.

Quite useful

There aren't many books on how to be good staff engineer. I'm not one yet, so it was helpful to learn more on the subject.

Not for all engineers

This book gives the impression that is for all engineers. It is not. It is written for software engineers by a software engineer. And unfortunately this makes it difficult to follow if you are not a software engineer. This book had a lot of potential to help more people if it had been written from a more universal perspective but the context is lost on non-software types and makes it too difficult to follow. It would also be nice if the description of the book made it clear that this is for software engineers.

Liked the book contents, hated the narration

I'm going to purchase this on Kindle as I just couldn't handle the narration. I tried several times. The narration was just too robotic for me with weird inflections. It reminded me of the AI narrations seen on Instagram and TikTok.