You did see the part about the four year stint at BigTech in between? Unless you think the second largest employee in the US is a “small little company”.
I also added an HN submission that made the front page a couple of days ago by a staff engineer at Google, did you notice the difference between how he didn’t really seem to need to prove his “impact”?
Finally, this isn’t r/cscareerquestions where you have a bunch of 22 year olds needing to prove themselves by mentioning “they work for a FAANG” (been there done that. Got the t-shirt. Didn’t like it)
> In an infrastructure organization, you need to impress your customers’ managers.
> I call this the Shadow Hierarchy. You don’t need your VP to understand the intricacies of your code. You need the Staff+ Engineers in other critical organizations to need your tools.
> When a Senior Staff Engineer in Pixel tells their VP, “We literally cannot debug the next Pixel phone without Perfetto”, that statement carries immense weight. It travels up their reporting chain, crosses over at the Director/VP level, and comes back down to your manager.
Visibility is important, it's just not the same kind of visibility.
The question I’m trying to answer is why are keeping metrics important at all?
From my experience working on and being the third highest contributor to what was a very popular open source “AWS Solution” in its niche, we kept metrics because we had to justify why it should it exist and why should we keep getting resources for it. This is the same reason that the Google Staff engineer that was in the linked article did it for his project.
The next reason is that to get promoted and to have something to put on your promo doc, you need to show “impact”.
But when you are at a staff level and no longer chasing promotions, it becomes perfunctory. You do it just because you are suppose to and do the bare minimum to check it off the list and stay in compliance. But everyone if any importance knows you.
That’s true at BigTech to my 1000+ company. No one from the C suite is wondering who employees #13545 is or what I have accomplished whether or not I go into details.
However I do make sure I get peer feedback from everyone that I work with officially or if I go the extra mile for them. I asked my manager do I need to record my goals for the year. He kind of shrugged and asked me was I trying to get promoted to a director or something (a manager role would be a horizontal move). I said “no”. he said not really.
I keep a personal career document just in case I need to prepare to interview because I stay ready to interview - I have for almost 20 years. I have been working for 30.
Then back to my minor criticism. It’s not like at a staff level once you have accomplished a lot and built up a network, you are going to be blindly submitting your resume to a job you found on Indeed. At that point your resume is just something to put in the ATS as part of the hiring process. But no one in the hiring prices is going to look at it. They are already targeting you to work there.
I had a director who was a former coworker at a well known non tech company basically offer to create a job just for me because he needed someone who he could trust. I’m not special, I just have a decent network and made a positive impression on a few people
Exactly this. I’m still friends with my former manager at AWS who is now an L7 “very important person” over a service there and another former coworker who is a tech lead over another service. He’s an L6. I can guarantee you neither of them are being micromanaged and have mostly autonomy. I’m sure they have to deal with OP1 goals (? It’s been awhile I think that’s the term).
Hell I was a lowly L5 consultant who they only entrusted to small projects and slices over larger projects (fair I only had 2 years of AWS experience at the time) and no one micromanaged me as long as I was doing my job. I flew out to customers sites by myself to lead work and my manager rarely knew what I was doing. I would go weeks without talking to him.
