Re:The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review
by jameshart on Wednesday May 17, 2023 @08:19PM
(#35982823)
These are all much more similar to the work of inventors than engineers.
Except Rollercoaster Tycoon, which is more like the work of an artist.
Like, coming up with Linux is a lot like Guglielmo Marconi putting together a working radio transmitter/receiver in his parents' attic.
These things can overlap. Art Fry, inventor of the Post-it note, was in a kind of 'principal engineer' equivalent role at 3M when he came up with it (he was the senior scientist in a lab team).
Well, we know stories behind each of these:
- linux kernel: comp sci Msc student - redis: written by a startup founder (in TCL[1]) - next.js: written by a founder of Vercel (as "Zeit") - rollercoaster tycoon: written by one dude in scottland
None of these people are Staff Engineers, in the sense of this book. You may find a few traveling between big tech companies but mostly as a prestige recruiting / consulting role. Or Torvalds, whose finances I don't really understand -- multiple sources say he gets a million dollar salary from the linux foundation?
You might also argue that the people who put more value on their skills as "hardcore engineer" end up in small firms and startups where equity comp can end up paying them what they're worth if the skills pan out. There was a "why is Google behind openAI even though they published the transformers paper" post recently that hinted that all the authors have left google for greener pastures, which supports this thesis.
[1] https://gist.github.com/antirez/6ca04dd191bdb82aad9fb241013e...