Career - Staff / principal

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34133673

At staff/principal level, my experience has been less about learning a new technology and more about organizational and customer needs.

• Experiment and learn

• Drive tech alignment across teams and orgs

• Focus on the key decisions

• Kill stupid things early on. If you fail at this, you essentially fail at the job

• Be the eyes and ears to look around corners… we’re shipping some product X. We have product teams, TPMs, software managers basically a small army of friction: competing priorities, territorialism and empire building, and then the doers who you really need to help make this product happen. Are the right people working in the right problems? Are we solving them in an efficient way, using the right tooling or tech?

• Partner up with the other passionate people in management. Define the tech vision and architecture so devs can continue building without burning out or running into stupid obstacles that demotivate them

• Help define the culture. Mentor. Figure out what people are good at and advise the managers on who is best suited to a problem: function of their skills, growth areas, need of business, etc

• have strong opinions. Don’t sway with the wind.

To summarize: your focus is resounding impact. Sweat the details but only the important ones. If you need to learn a language or how something works, do your own research and go consult with other smart people in the space. Don’t pretend to know things you don’t. Be up front and ask a junior person to help you make sense of what it is you have, why are things the way they are, and how we got here.