Engineering leadership · Book notes
Will Larson's Staff Engineer and the authority you borrow
Will Larson's Staff Engineer says the title brings almost no authority of its own, because you borrow it from your manager and keep it by staying aligned.
The title isn’t going to give you the authority. The track that you’re on is not going to give you the authority. You actually have to earn this authority from the bottom up. And I would say that the best CTOs and CEOs, yes, they have the title, but they also legitimately have earned it.
Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track by Will Larson (2021) is about the IC career path beyond the senior engineer role. It’s split into two parts: the first part contains guides to the work of the role, and the second part contains interviews with staff engineers about how the role plays out in practice at their employers.
Larson’s guide to staying aligned with authority is candid about the source of that authority: it’s borrowed (typically from your direct manager), and the power granted to you can be revoked. That’s reasonable! Your title gets you a seat at the table, but your boss determines how much that seat weighs on any given day.
As a staff engineer, yes, you have some authority, but most of your authority, almost all of it, is derived from the managers. And to be an effective leader, you actually have to be a more effective follower.
Emulating this in a place where you don’t have authority actually has a lot of benefits, right? A staff engineer doesn’t hire and fire folks typically, so therefore you’re not in this sidestep of, oh, if I interact with this person, are they going to fire me?
But there’s a real freedom, even though you have a lender, right? People will tell you things as a staff engineer that they would never tell you if you were a director, because there’s no performance review on the line.
There’s an amount of fight picking you can do in private to hopefully change their opinions or determine direction. There is zero fight picking you can do in public because, especially as an individual contributor, you need to be aligned completely with what they do. That’s where you derive all of your authority. And so if at a certain point you don’t trust the decisions they’re making, it’s just game over.
You can dissent in private, but the cost of keeping the loan is public alignment. This idea raises the question: if your authority is borrowed from a single manager, what’s it worth when that manager leaves this week?