The Staff Engineer's Path

Review on the "The Staff Engineer's Path" book!

Author: Tanya Reilly

Personal Rating: 4/5

Personal Review:

This is a fantastic book!!! I loved it. I would recommend this book to all kinds of software engineers. This is not a coding or technical book. This a handbook on the Sr+ people carrier and future. The topics mostly relate to what, when, how, where, and the nots,  and most importantly the necessary soft skills.

Sr+ engineers can relate the contents and events more easily. It will look like they are reading their life on these 300 pages. I do not know how the writer captured all of my life experiences within this book. I also heard similar things from other sr+/Staff+ people about this book.

Jr or Mid-level Engineers will see a glimpse of leader's life and work. What they are dealing with, and how to deal with them. And what they are expecting in their future careers.

Quote from the book:

If you're the most senior person on the team and you're sloppy, you're going to have a sloppy team

Avoid those "watermelon projects": if the project status is green from one key problem that's going to be impossible to solve, the project status is not really green!

I realized he wasn't slacking: he was intimidated. He'd come from an operations role and had been used to the kind of interrupt driven work where you bounce from fire to fire, rarely getting a block of focus time. This project was his opportunity to begin writing code, but he didn't really believe he could do it, and so he couldn't get started.

If there's any step you can automate, automate it.

The same is true for every temporay hack: if you don't have it in good shape by the end of the project, it's going to take extraordinary effort to clean it up later.

Imposter syndrome is a horrible, insecure feeling: it can even make you do less good work because you don't feel safe taking calculated risks. Take comfort in the fact that it's common, even at this level.

When someone asks you to review a document or pull request or conference talk, do call out the sections that you think are great, but pay them the respect of being(kindly!) honest about their work

I can write 100s of quotes but I think it's better you explore them by reading those.

Link: Amazon Link