What does a Staff Engineer do All Day?
We all heard about a myth people called Staff Engineers! And what do they do actually? Write code, do they talk the whole day, or sleep yada yada yada!
Inception
I have been working as a Staff Engineer at Protolabs Network since 2023. And I have been fortunate to work with some amazing staff engineers in different workspaces. So when I could not miss the opportunity to give a talk at a small conference arranged by our engineering team. The talk topic was "What does EM/Staff do all day!". Now this blog highlights some aspects of that talk on Staffs role I maintain in the current company.
I did a live voting poll to understand what does out audience thinks about us, the staff engineers 😅.
👆, this is what the audience thinks about staff engineers in our company.
The Two Weeks schedule
Instead of explaining everything, here is my two-week calendar! I added some color to make it more sense, and give it a more categorized view. Let me give some brief examples:
- Monitoring: Every morning I start my day by looking into the dashboards, and errors, run some queries to see what happened, and most importantly DataDog/NewRelic.
- Mentoring: Where I actively Work with people to help them with their careers, pair code, sponsor their ideas, etc.
- Any Sync: Any kind of meeting, chatting, having coffee with people to understand the unknown unknowns or everything related to product, tech, future planning, etc.
- Meta Planning Meeting: All of our staff engineers sit down together to talk about planning, issues, meta-level planning, etc.
- Glue: Connect the dots, check issues, take interviews, and anything that connects things to achieve company OKRs.
- Doc Read: You know it 😊
- Doc Write: You already know, what is happening here 😊.
- POC: Some code writing 😅, which will never go to production(95% time). These activities mostly help me to dive deeper into technologies we are working on and whether we are going to implement them or not 🙏🏼.
- Friday Stuffs/Fun Stuffs: Lot's presentation, demos, retros, socials, etc.
Looking Closer
Here I just tried to combine my activities into higher groups.
- What happened before
- What's happening now
- What's the forecast
- Let's connect them together
- Now let's figure out things for the Future
- Yay, We are Creating history
More specifically:
