The thing is that every non-tech company is now in some sense in the tech industry, whether they mean to be or not; a large part of their business is done online. As opposed to companies that specialize in building tech for other companies, many of them have nickel-and-dimed their way into their own hardware/software infrastructure and the maintenance of that has become crucial to their normal operations, to the point where instead of business logic dictating changes to it, it frequently dictates changes to their business logic. That puts independent devs for those companies in a kind of catbird seat to determine which stacks and which infrastructure are going to drive the next round of growth. Some people (like my friend who's a salesman for Salesforce) call this "technical debt", but really it's bootstrapping and the better and cheaper you can do it through indy devs, the better your bottom line.
So it's quite different than the normal software world, but it's neither what you're calling a staff position nor is it actually a line position.
There are plenty of staff positions where incompetence could be very damaging or deadly to the business. E.g. in-house lawyers or accountants, even HR in some circumstances (failing to act in the presence of a hostile work environment). That doesn't mean it's not a staff position.
By the definitions of the article, the head of engineering at a tech company, or even the CEO, are considered support staff. Their success and failures will 100% map to the success and failures of the company.
The business school mantra is invest in profit centers, nickel-and-dime cost centers. If you are so unfortunate as to be at a company run by an MBA and are in a cost center, woe to you.
Some wise exec had the vision to outsource it to an external company and then Motorola (that was already on the path to its death) realized how much was done outside of the process (which is typical for such companies, fortunately or not).
Suddenly your threat of whatever happening if your thing is not fine had exactly zero value against "raise a ticket". Everything crawled to a stop because of that and "golden tickets" were used.
This is one true example of why you should think 20 times before outsourcing something you do not understand.
Why equate them as the same here?
That reminds me of an article that was linked from here, a couple of years ago, titled “IT Runs On Java 8”[0].
I worked for hardware manufacturers, for most of my career, and can report that it’s even worse.
That’s because the company does have an engineering culture, but one with drastically different priorities and processes.
Our software shops were expected to run in hardware patterns.
A problem I deal with personally is growing into "Staff" style work. I'd love to have bigger, wider impacts on a more strategic level, but I'm so damn good at getting into line work and doing a good job of it. (I also understand myself well enough to know that I like stabbing away at a technical problem way more than I like a VP or C-level planning meeting.) I also feel like I've gotten so good at doing "line" style work that there doesn't seem to be org pressure to promote me. My perception is that I'm considered too good on the "line"; I'd be a loss to the org to move up a notch. This could also mean that I'm actually not as good as I think I am, or can't see the forest for the trees. It could also be a sign of what a brutal struggle promotion is for "line" style workers. (More competition, less routes up the ladder.)
Is there a path to grow there, or am I just doomed to be a Principal Engineer? (Not the worst fate, "doomed" is probably too strong a word there lol)
In this article, a new grad who works on basic HR IT tasks for a factory is doing staff work. That’s not staff level scope in the Will Larson sense.
There are plenty of “staff software engineers” in the Will Larson sense who create strategy for new product lines and launch them - “line” level work. Also plenty who work on DevX - “staff” level work.
They direct and advise on technical strategy, but delegate execution to others, because having the 10k foot view is typically more valuable when deployed on strategic opportunities.
Will uses "Staff Software Engineer" as the rank of Staff (I.e. one above Senior).
This article uses "staff engineer" not as the rank, but as the type of engineer (Line vs staff).
Money wasted in a "profit center" has exactly the effect on bottom line as the same waste in a "cost center", and failure of a "cost center" can have just as large an effect on your business as in a "profit center". The only meaningful distinction is that the return on investment in a "cost center" is gated by the success of "profit centers".
But, woe betide if you find yourself in a cost center at a company run by MBAs. Get yourself to a profit center, or to a better-run, less MBA-saddled company.
First time I've ever heard these two things talked about as a matter of "this versus that" and not "combat and logistics".
I'd hate to be a CO or NCO under a General who looked at the two as somehow adversarial or mutually exclusive in terms of planning and resourcing.
Yours is quite an interesting analogy, here.
Look at the Ukraine War… Russia clearly completely ignored logistics and failed in their attempt at a “modern” war and quickly degraded to a WW1 style artillery duel.
And yes, being a NCO or field officer in the Russian army is miserable.
Not sure if you’re being sarcastic? Or haven’t read much about the military and are assuming?
Combat vs combat support vs combat service support (logistics) is a very common and very significant distinction to make and usually matters a lot for a great many things.
Has a logistics branch officer ever led a major Army? We had an artillery officer in the UK and even that was a talking point at the time.
My problem is that you seemingly get locked into it. The only people who want to talk to me are staff positions, the “line” roles do not want me at all. Technically my current role is at a tech company, but in a “staff-like” position and happens to be one of the least recognized teams invoice department because the work is among the least visible and a very tiny percentage of the companies income.
I have a similar feeling, I like doing low level work but I also mentoring junior engineers, hopefully that mentoring will multiply my overall output over time!
I also really like the mentorship angle. It's really cool to watch someone grow, and how fast they do when given stuff that's just outside their current capability level.
It’s tricky because I need hands on experience but the desire to switch to a more strategic, executive-style role. Plus folks need to have the core communication and people skills to manage a complex set of stakeholders.
Hard to find good people, but the people I find tend to be very very good.
At a previous company, they moved a lot of their top performer “line” engineers to staff level and they all felt unproductive and eventually quit.
> The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter, which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.[
Second, as we move to more open source for infrastructure software (the tools used by staff) the above becomes more clear. SAP is charging for something with zero marginal cost, therefore it's perfectly valid to say they are renting software and hopefully using the money to develop the next version.
As the world moves to more open source I think you'll see fewer line software people, as the staff will do both support of the business and push some changes upstream (equivalent to what the line guys at sofware companies do). Once software is mature the rent model is really obsolete, but maintenance still has to be done by someone.
In fact, when things are tight is the very moment you should go all in for R&D.
Let's clear up something simple people forget: when things are tight for you, they are normally also tight for your customers. In fact, that's generally how they become tight for you.
So you can forget investing in production and sales when things are tight. Things are tight because the world is in a period where your customers aren't buying. You won't change that by trying to sell harder.
However, small research projects are an incredibly cheap way to learn things and invent new technologies. When you're not encumbered by turning things into products, you can discover at a frightening speed. So you spend on research when the times are tough, and then when things go better you have a huge backlog of technologies you can apply right away.
And recessions are the time when this research is at its cheapest.
But that's how it's meant when people use it like that. They mean they want to do the work somewhere where it's (considered by the accounting department) a profit centre; not cost. That doesn't mean it could be another way for that company or that nobody should work there, much the same way as OP isn't saying nobody staff vs. line is right vs. wrong nor vice versa.
You might disagree with these examples but:
A stock trading company, IT stuff are support for the real employees, the traders. You have a trader, you have a trading company. The programmers are just support for them.
Animated Movies (even pixar). Sure, there are important software devs but the real staff at pixar are animators. They can ship animations with off the shelf software or paper and pencil. In house software devs are super important but at the end of the day if all they had was animators they could still ship animation.
Lawyer firms, Medical Facilities: Yea, they need IT staff to help run things but they can function with just lawyers or just doctors.
VS say Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft. No devs, no company.
Video Game companies used to be and probably mostly still are this way. No software devs no product ships. That might be fraying as tools get better.
While you are correct in that at a lot of finance companies, devs just act as "support for the real business" (e.g., Goldman Sachs). But there are others where devs and quants pretty much harmoniously run the show.
Look at something like Jane Street and their tech blog[0]. Their annual "what our interns have wrought" blog posts grab my attention like nothing else, and from everything I read coming from them, it seems like engineering there is not just "support for the real business". And there are quite a few companies in fintech like this, they just won't be flashed in the mass media due to their relatively small size, but everyone in the industry (and plenty of people on the outside) knows about them. Out of all things, they are known as one of the largest contributors to OCaml language and its ecosystem.
Jane Street was just a singular example, and there are other fintech firms of a similar engineering-focused culture.
Market makers like Jane Street are not fintech. They are trading companies.
Jane Street in particular is still very much gut-feeling point-and-click trading, compared to Jump and Citadel Securities.
Fintech companies are more related to payments: Stripe, Gusto, Plaid, etc.
Another difference is pay/TC: trading companies pay significantly more than fintech and MAANG, even for SWEs.
But the overal company culture and the upper echelons of leadership very strongly reflected EA's history as a software publishing company founded by business folks, and not a group of game makers who set out to build their own company. It was very much about producers, money, marketing, etc.
I used to joke that EA was in the business of selling disks and that the games on them were merely an annoying chore that they were obliged to do in order to get people to buy them. It often felt like they considered the entire dev team to be a cost center.
We had one title I worked on where the "interviews with the dev team" was all just interviews with the external producers(aka PM who came in from the publisher to keep everything "on track").
Never happened to us but the best one I heard was that the publisher puts a clause in your contract that they get the source+IP if you go bankrupt(protect their investments, their taking huge risk, etc....). However about 2/3 through development when the studio is at peak HC burn they would start denying milestones for trivial things. One, two milestones go by and the studio burns through all cash, folds and publisher gets source+IP. Publisher then hires the dev team, who just lost their jobs, at a reduced rate(most gamedev a don't have great savings...) to finish out the game, avoids paying any royalties and picks up the IP.
Happy to be out of that industry, some really interesting technical challenges and driven people but the whole thing is similar to the recording industry in the way they exploit people and passions for their own gain.
Not the norm, but I suspect it probably happens more than it should...but this is the sensation I'm feeling about "Devops engineers" in the last few years. Which, yeah, we could sit here and talk all day about whether or not "Devops engineers" should be a job title at all, because Devops is a "way of working" or whatever but that's kinda the self-fulfilling problem isn't it?
Devops was supposed to be a way of working and somehow it got turned into "Help Desk for the App Developers" in way too many environments and orgs, where too many great Developers with Operational capabilities end up being on the receiving end of "the devs are working on feature x, we need someone to do this, and we failed to really figure out our engineering resourcing needs, so uh, I dunno give it to the Devops team to deal with".
At least, I was fairly surprised by how our devops team looked at what I was trying to push onto them until I learned their origin story.
I could easily hop to a gig with more responsibility and more opportunity for increasing my skills - but also more stress.
That sounds like a pretty ideal scenario to me, but I'm not sure how to go about finding similar positions.
Now it seems to be Jr / n/a / Senior / sort of equal footing for Staff/Principal depending on whether you're a generalist or specialist? And Staff might also be Lead but also not? I've read Larson's stuff and I'm still not sure the moniker is useful in a way "Senior" wasn't, except to the degree other titles have inflated. (I've seen three resumes in the past week for "senior" applicants with 2y experience or less restricted to a single stack.)
But my impression using it in school was the standard library was even worse than Java. Where Java buries things under six namespaces of reverse domain name, C# buries them under what looks like random technical terms chosen to impress people.
ie there is no reason for System.Console.WriteLine() or System.Collections.ArrayList to be where they are. It doesn’t make your program work better.
Still, even customer proximity is not always a useful distinction, and certainly doesn't have to be a static one. I wonder if this industry resists distinctions among people or groups like these due to something at the root of the hacker culture that created it, like a realization/commitment to the idea that the only really worthwhile distinction is the bit.
I'm not sure I buy the dark matter idea. In the US there are only on the order of a few million software developers, you don't have to go very far down a list of FAANG/FAANG-like high paying tech companies to reach on the order of a few hundred thousand US-employed programmers at those firms (~10% of the market, already exceeding ordinary matter's 5% of the universe). Decide on a consistent definition of tech company in general and add in all of the programmers from them and it wouldn't surprise me at all if tech company employees actually exceeded non-tech, though I can see it being the other way too, just not being "vast majority".
As for stories from roles at non-tech places, most are probably told orally (especially to fellow employees at larger companies as cautionary tales of the crazy messes out there that make their own current insanity look pretty sane) but also remember that at any given time like half of the professional market has been in it for less than 5 years (how many of them got into tech-company vs non-tech-company roles?). And remember you may have read stories from them but not realized it because the actual work regardless of line/staff or tech/non-tech company distinction itself for programmers can be so similar, so it's not always clear whether some story on e.g. The Daily WTF is from which (though sometimes it is or you can guess).
These two types of roles were called line vs staff when I took a business school class and I think the differences between these two types of roles have a big impact on what the job is like, even if doing the same type of work. It's a bit confusing because it overlaps with 'staff software engineer' term.
I recall hearing stats before that the vast majority of developers work at non-tech companies, but I almost never hear their stories. They are the dark matter of software developers.