A House-Dog Staff Engineer Surviving in the Wild

As the title says, I'm a staff engineer who used to live a pretty happy life at home. Why do I say that, and how did I figure it out? It all starts with realizing I was close to burning out.

A Seemingly Smooth Start#

I think I'm a pretty lucky person. Just over a month in, once trust with the team had been built, my manager asked if I'd help run a project to get a sense of where the product team currently stood. Believing that more context would help me build a longer-term plan for the team, I said yes.

The team was great. The PM was my lunch buddy, and our vibes matched well enough that we could swap life stories for hours. My designer and QA were responsible, thoughtful humans, and the engineers were colleagues I'd already worked with fairly well during my first month. Everything should go smoothly, right?

Besides wanting me to own the project, the EM also wanted me to mentor teammates. After thinking it over, that made sense. As a staff engineer, mentorship is one of the core kinds of value I'm supposed to provide. "No problem, let's head in that direction and see how it goes." I remember replying something like that.

Nearly Burning Out#

I was being naive.

As trust grew and my expertise got recognized (which, by staff standards, should probably just happen naturally, but I'm still very grateful the team accepted me so quickly), PR reviews started pouring in like snowflakes. More engineers came to me for technical discussions, along with technical evaluations for cross-team projects, architecture reviews for a brand-new product line, and so on. On top of all that was this project: my mentees needed far more time and energy in communication and attention than I'd expected, and my manager's level of involvement was high enough that it started to feel a bit like micromanagement, which happens to be the one thing I handle worst. It really bothered me.

Getting everything to meet my own standards in such a short time was genuinely hard. So I picked up the pace, cut unnecessary requirement discussions, and eventually even stretched my working hours. I noticed I wasn't happy with how I was doing, and for once I started to feel stuck, which made me uncomfortable. That's when I realized I was close to burnout. Discovering this within a single week hit me like a bolt from the blue. I'm not fresh out of school anymore, so how did I let myself get here? I felt a bit down and sad.

Talking to J#

So I thought, why not talk to my fellow staff engineer, J?

I'm not sure if I've mentioned J before. He was a big reason I accepted this company's offer: he's sincere and straightforward, yet he knows how to treat and communicate with people, and of course his technical skills are beyond question. I remember in my third week of onboarding, during our 1:1, J said the only thing he cared about was that I, as a fellow staff engineer, wouldn't compete with him. "I won't. Even if I beat you, so what? Then you'd become the ceiling of my growth. That's a zero-sum game, and that's exactly what I like least. Let's learn from each other instead. That's the relationship I want us to have." I asked if we should set up a recurring 1:1. "Let's not. I want us to talk often, and a 1:1 cadence would probably be too slow for me."

So I brought my questions to J.

He shared that as staff engineers, because we're useful, and because our relationship with our managers is usually more of a partnership than being managed, very few people pay attention to whether we've got too much on our plates. That means we have to be really careful to protect our own time and focus. He suggested I lay out all my current projects, ask the managers to help prioritize them, and make sure we were all aligned.

Putting Priorities on the Table#

Following his advice, I set up a meeting about the project I mentioned earlier to clarify my manager's needs and expectations. In that meeting I learned more of the backstory and context, understood where his concerns came from, and suddenly those requirements made complete sense. I also shared my own perspective and proposed how to move forward, and we reached agreement.

What I want to point out is that J was also in that meeting. Once again, from a staff engineer's point of view, he explained that we need to continuously manage the priorities of what's on our plates, and that the managers need to know we have to do this to deliver work that meets our standards. After all, our time isn't fully in our own hands, and something more urgent or important can pop up at any moment. I also shared in the meeting that this is something I'm not yet good at, that I'd check in more often, and that if anyone noticed, they were welcome to remind me.

Turns Out I Was a House Dog#

This experience made me realize I really had been like a happy house dog living in a human's home. Back when I led the platform team, prioritization was simple: the further something was from my area, the further down the list it went. Unless there was something urgent, it generally wouldn't reach me. Also, not every engineer came to me directly. My manager handled resources and people for my group, and product engineers usually went through their own managers, who filtered the scope of requests and individual capabilities, before they got to the point of working with me. So in the past, both people and work were simple. My focus was clear, and the people I mentored were basically already mature.

Step One: Find Water#

Now, though, I've been released into the wild at a new company. Still a house dog at heart, I asked J: is this situation normal for a staff engineer? Having been a staff engineer at one more company than me, he quietly nodded. "Yep. Step one is to find a water source. You have to accept that water won't just show up in your bowl like it used to." I laughed out loud.

My mentees grew noticeably over the following weeks, and my manager DMed me to ask how I did it, but that's a story for another time.

Even a house-dog staff engineer is working hard to survive out on the grasslands!