It seems like you are bucketing senior eng skills into bureaucracy or… agility? ability to work quickly and responsively? That is missing most of what makes staff engineers staff engineers. Start-ups want engineers who are overpowered for the immediate problem because they anticipate scaling, and decisions made now will affect their ability to do that later. EA is growing but AFAIK not at nearly the speed it would take to make use of those skills: you’re more likely to end up with something terribly overbuilt for the purpose.
From what you describe, I think you’d be much better off looking for a kick-ass mid-level PM with a coding background who wants to get back into engineering. They’d be giving up much less (both in terms of money, painstakingly acquired skills they enjoy using, and future option value), and are more likely to have the skills you actually want.
> Start-ups want engineers who are overpowered for the immediate problem because they anticipate scaling, and decisions made now will affect their ability to do that later.
I’m sure this is true of some startups, but was not true of mine, nor the ones I was thinking of what I wrote that.
Senior engineers are like… Really good engineers? Not sure how to describe it in a non-tautological way. I somewhat regularly see a senior engineer solve in an afternoon a problem which a junior engineer has struggled with for weeks.
Being able to move that quickly is extremely valuable for startups.
(I agree that many staff engineers are not “really good engineers” in the way I am describing, and are therefore probably not of interest to many EA organizations.)
It seems like you are bucketing senior eng skills into bureaucracy or… agility? ability to work quickly and responsively? That is missing most of what makes staff engineers staff engineers. Start-ups want engineers who are overpowered for the immediate problem because they anticipate scaling, and decisions made now will affect their ability to do that later. EA is growing but AFAIK not at nearly the speed it would take to make use of those skills: you’re more likely to end up with something terribly overbuilt for the purpose.
From what you describe, I think you’d be much better off looking for a kick-ass mid-level PM with a coding background who wants to get back into engineering. They’d be giving up much less (both in terms of money, painstakingly acquired skills they enjoy using, and future option value), and are more likely to have the skills you actually want.
> Start-ups want engineers who are overpowered for the immediate problem because they anticipate scaling, and decisions made now will affect their ability to do that later.
I’m sure this is true of some startups, but was not true of mine, nor the ones I was thinking of what I wrote that.
Senior engineers are like… Really good engineers? Not sure how to describe it in a non-tautological way. I somewhat regularly see a senior engineer solve in an afternoon a problem which a junior engineer has struggled with for weeks.
Being able to move that quickly is extremely valuable for startups.
(I agree that many staff engineers are not “really good engineers” in the way I am describing, and are therefore probably not of interest to many EA organizations.)