THE STAFF ENGINEER’S PATH

Now available in English, Korean, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Polish!

Where to get it

Since I get this question a lot:

Local bookstores: If you’re debating where to buy books from, the absolute best place is a local indie bookshop. Local bookshops keep resources in your local community, and give people a cool place to hang out. Help them stay in business.

Two ways to buy online but still nominate a local bookshop to support are…

buy paper books from bookshop.org!
buy audiobooks from libro.fm!

Libraries: For the record, I’m also a-ok with you checking out the book from your local library. It’s available from tons of local libraries (via Overdrive/Libby), just connect up your library account.

Other bookstores: And it’s also available from lots of other places, for example:

kobo.com

ebooks.com

schroff publishers (India edition)

oreilly.com (via a subscription)

decoding.co.kr (Korean translation by Grace Kim!)

entre-libros.com (Spanish translation)

audible.com (audiobook)

amazon.com (English or Spanish)

…etc!

I’d love to add some other booksellers around the world. Got a favorite I should add? Tell me: [email protected]

RESOURCES

LINKS

Curious about something I mentioned in the book? Looking for a footnote?

Check out a list of chapter-by-chapter links and resources.

BOOK DISCUSSION

Here’s a conversation with Suzan Bond about where the book came from, what a staff engineer is, and why we need technical leadership roles.

FURTHER READING

The Staff Engineer’s Path has three parts: big picture thinking, project execution and leveling up.

PART ONE: BIG PICTURE THINKING

Part one of the book is about understanding the big picture of your company and your organization, creating that big picture for other people with vision and strategy, and being willing to make the big decisions that are blocking other people. That includes understanding your own impact: we dive into what a Staff+ engineer even is and why the industry needs them.

More from me on these topics:

• Here’s my intro as cohost of the first ever Staff Engineering conference. (It was such a great conference! The Lead Dev folks are magical.)

• As part of that same conference, I got to interview a tech luminary: Diane Tang, Google Fellow.

• I wrote the foreword to Will Larson’s fantastic book, Staff Engineer.

• On making decisions and reviewing architecture as a group: The Maybe-Great Idea

• Slowing down to go faster: Continuous

• Why we need an IC track: Not all Engineering Leaders are Engineering Managers

• Thinking ahead: Sending Gifts to Future-You

• Accentuate the Negative: Making the non-perfect decision:

• Having impact in engineering by supporting other people’s ideas

• Design documents, maybe the only record of what the hell you were thinking

• The Nuts and Bolts with Tanya Reilly: What is a principal engineer at Squarespace? and other questions

• The Power of “Yes, if”: Iterating on our RFC Process, for the Squarespace engineering blog

PART TWO: PROJECT EXECUTION

Part two is about project execution. Staff+ engineers can take on massive ambiguous cross-org projects and make them succeed despite the difficulty. This part of the book talks about how to survive and thrive during the whole project lifecycle, how to get past the difficult parts, how to manage your time, energy and social capital, and a whole lot of tactics for keeping things moving.

More from me on these topics.

• I moderated this panel of excellent, insightful people: Sustaining and Growing Motivation Across Projects

• Mapping the immovable objects in engineering projects

• How to break out of the thread of doom

• Surviving the organizational side quest

• I like taking notes and I recommend it. Can somebody volunteer to take notes

• Nobody could have predicted this. Can RFCs help us predict failures? (Sort of.)

• How to make a big technical change: I wouldn’t start from here.

PART THREE: LEVELLING UP

A Staff+ engineer is a force multiplier. In part three, I talk about how to directly be a good influence through mentorship, sponsorship, coaching, delegation, and great code and design reviews, and how to indirectly be a good influence by modelling what a great engineer looks like. We’ll also look at learning and how to level yourself up and give away your job.

More from me on these topics:

• Still the most popular thing I’ve ever done in my life: Being Glue

• Embrace your inner incident commander! How to be the grownup in the room when everything’s on fire.

• How to make onboarding easier

• A grab bag of advice for engineers, junior and senior

• You really don’t know what feigned surprise is?

• Hacking scared humans to help them do things they don’t think they can do

• Delegation means not answering all the questions

• Why learning is the most important skill in tech

• Staff engineer communities: why we need them and how to find them