The transition from Senior Engineer to Staff Engineer isn't just about writing more complex code. It is about expanding your field of vision. A Senior Engineer owns a service; a Staff Engineer owns the spaces between the services.
But how do you teach that? How do you take an incredibly talented coder who operates in a silo and turn them into a "Systems Thinker"?
Let’s look at a classic engineering management scenario, the standard naive reaction, and the Staff-level approach to building a resilient engineering culture.
The Scenario: The Siloed Senior Engineer
Let's say you have a Senior Engineer on one of your product squads named David. David is fantastic at writing Go. He is the technical owner of the Receipt PDF Generation service. His code is spotless, his test coverage is 90%+, and he ships features on time.
