Let’s discuss how Engineering Managers can support their people on the journey toward the Staff Engineer Role. Why should we as EMs care about that? Of course, their success is your success and having staff engineers in your group lifts you up as well. But more important is that having one or more staff engineers in your group will allow you to kick in a few metaphorical technical doors toward a larger organizational impact.

This is one of my larger learnings of the last year(s) as an Engineering Manager and as a Manager of other Engineering Managers. It’s also something I had to learn the hard-ish way as I did it wrong in my first leadership role, and watched peers struggle hard in my current role. My default brain setting is “anarchism” and I have a hard time following the rules, whatever they may be, so this one is a particularly hard challenge for me.

As I am jumpstarting this blog, I would like to start this project with some thoughts around Gratitude towards the life I was able to build by working in the tech industry. Let’s see for how long I can keep it up, as many blogs get started, and few get kept running. Photo by lilartsy We, as software professionals, like to complain a lot. Sometimes over very silly things whether you need Kubernetes and Microservices to deploy your silly app with no users, sometimes over things that do matter a lot, like how we managed to mess up the inclusion of underrepresented groups so badly.