The staff title unlocks a new level of self-aggrandizement which is on display here and in certain published books.

As for professional qualities, I don’t think there is one. It takes a staff engineer at FAANG to do what a senior can do at a smaller company, because of all the other self—important people not listening to you. (Dealing with that is a skill though, so having that skill might be it.)

> It takes a staff engineer at FAANG to do what a senior can do at a smaller company

This is beyond laughable. FAANGs are pretty much the only place where staff is actually hard to make.

I see countless "senior" engineers with 3 years of experience in smaller companies.

The truth is it would take a good entry-level FAANG engineer to match a senior engineer in a smaller company.

The GP is saying that FAANG companies need staff engineers to navigate the politics enough to achieve the same level of productivity as a senior engineer in a small company.

i don’t see why the size of the company one works for has to be correlated with an engineer’s skill level. i’ve seen some of the best programmers i ever met cone out of 10 years working at a small company because it happened to be closer to his kid’s school route.

I'm sure there are exceptions (and it's way more likely that the very top are in FANGs, maybe the distinguished engineers making millions per year?) but I was never particularly impressed with the level of skills of average FANGs people.

The difference in compensation between NBA and local games is millions to nothing - between FANGs and other company there is a much smaller factor and there are way more perks in some small companies than in FANGs: less politics, no PIPs, remote, low tax / low cost of living locations, no 6m to prepare for an interview, riskier equities (if that's your thing), CTO path, etc.

All my FANGs friends ended up in smaller companies after having marked their CV as ex-Apple or ex-Google.

If I were younger and I was earning less and happy to sacrifice quality of life to live in some big city, I would spend the 6m prep-time and leetcode, just to have the FANG name on my CV and charge more to other businesses later on.

> but I was never particularly impressed with the level of skills of average FANGs people.

People always say this and yet somehow the markets never align <shrug>

The rest is a strange digression.

Sports and programming just aren't comparable. Some finnish student wrote the linux kernel my man, while living with his parents.

Have you ever heard the expression "the exception that proves the rule"?

Also I love how you think the Linux kernel is valuable because Linus started it and not because millions of hours have been invested in it by other engineers (most of whom are employed by big corps).

You've missed the point. OP is discussing affordance, not skill. A senior engineer at a smaller company may have equal or less skill than a staff engineer at a larger company, but they have more affordance if there are less cogs in the bureaucratic machine that need oiling whenever they need to get something done. Experience in a variety of workplaces will give you the same intuition.

Nothing. The manager reads the Phsycology of the engineer and gives them whatever title which makes them happy. Since vast majority of humans find meaning and purposes in random words this works.(Starts with identification with their own randomly assigned name when they were born). A better measurement of significance would be the amount of money one get paid. That has more correlation with reality than random titles.

For example a mid experienced engineer at Nvidia is doing better than a staff engineer at a random tech company because of their millions of dollars gains in Nvidia stocks.

Now you can write all day about being a "staff engineer" in LinkedIn or blog posts and how that is such a big deal blah blah blah. But all that is spam when we measure it with reality (your bank account).

+1

They can call me "junior" or whatever they like, just give me more comp please.

I used to think like that, but having a title helps switching jobs.

In my experience, staff engineer is an an alternate role to software architect - some companies have the former, others the latter. When doing something that requires serious design work, an architect typically does it by drawing diagrams, sitting in meetings, writing docs, but not doing coding that much. Staff engineers tend to be more coding and technically focused, they bootstrap features by designing and coding the skeleton and coordinate the work of oter engineers in building out the feature.

It's a much more natural career path for people with a coding background but some companies, particularly enterprisey ones with lots of bureaucracy, prefer architects.

Scope of influence. A senior should be defining and building things within their team. A staff engineer or a principal should be influencing things more broadly than their team.

Correct. The old not what you know but who you know. Unless you've developed that influence and lived the role then most don't understand what it entails. Getting things done at a massive company can be very hard.

Within the same company? Money, that's about it. Between companies there is no standardization of levels, titles, and responsibilities.

Fun fact: at IBM a "Staff" is actually junior to a "Senior". So it's all over the place anyway.

The latest trend in new companies is to not assign named titles at all, just numbered levels.

It's like that in a lot of companies which were influenced by IBM way back.

The size of the company handing out the titles.

It's company dependent but in general less coding, more management, more decision making power, more money, different responsibility.

A senior in one org may have the responsibilities of the staff in another one, it depends.

Nonsense.

This is a trick question, because the only correct answer is "it depends".

The definitions are arbitrary and vary - sometimes wildly or completely opposite - from company to company and industry to industry. Some companies don't use titles at all and use levels - which are also arbitrary and differ accordingly.

If you never leave the incestuous Silicon Valley bubble, however, you may never learn this.

Different spellings.

Salary bands

they can overlap a lot across titles