6 things I learned interviewing for Staff positions
I recently completed an either 9 month or 2 month search for a new job, looking for Staff-level engineering positions for the first time in my career. I live-snarked much of the process on Twitter and heard that was helpful to some folks who are also thinking about starting their first Staff-level search. Some reasons this blog post may not be interesting or ring true to you:
Let’s start with something as basic as titles. Every new company I talked to meant diving into their levels. Is there a concept of Staff-level titles? Is “Staff” literally a title, but there are additional titles that comprise “Staff+” ranks? There’s a ton of variation.
Next, not only does each company have different assumptions about what Staff means, there are likely many variants of Staff-level work within a single company. Will Larson does a good job of outlining four different archetypes for Staff-roles, although these are more valid for small/mid-size companies. I took a shot at outlining archetypes at Salesforce (50k employees). It’s likely that each company and even each manager you talk to will have assumptions about what combination of skills they’re hiring for and an inability to articulate them.
There are some basic questions you can ask to get a better sense of the role without ruffling any feathers. You can ask if the role will involve writing production code or not. Does the role do any programming at all? If it’s mostly prototype code, find someone in the role currently and ask how much time they’ve put into a recent prototype. You’re looking for whether they talk about days, weeks or months: how much time will this role spend programming (production or prototype)? For the rest of the work, will the role be meeting heavy or writing heavy? What authority does the title provide and what is it expected that you build up as informal influence?
