alt Hacker NewsIt's easy to write that blogpost when you are in a position of a lot of privilege, in arguably the best software engineering company in the world, and got where you are surely for your competence, but also a high degree of luck.
Some other people has to grind harder and even be better than you to get half of your success, that doesn't mean that they are wrong, or that the book is wrong.
I believe a lot, if not all advice there in the book is necessary. Other people might not work at Google, but as I've said before, might need to grind different gears in order to be successful, if you don't -- good for you!
A lot of your suggestions would get you fired very quickly on many companies, it's good that it all works for you.
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It’s not luck. To assume so, let alone say so, is uninformed and quite rude.
Getting into these roles requires a ton of hard work. Yes, it’s a grind.
If you feel it’s only achievable with luck, I suggest you’re selling yourself short.
There are staff level jobs like that in every company. However they are hard to get into. You have to prove yourself constantly and for long enough that the executives trust they can leave you alone and you will solve problems. You here means your team, as a staff engineer you likely have a lot of more junior engineers working under you.
My brother had an internship in a medium-sized company, and after 6 months, a new product (that he was hired for basically) and 3 new internal tools (including one for reading data trace, which, after reading this, is quite a propos), he was hired as a staff engineer.
I do not have his proactivity for sure, nor I have his ease with other people, but I managed to land my job in an infra/tool for network and security without much difficulties.
My goal with this post was not to claim this is a universal template to success for everyone but simply sharing an approach that worked for me.
I tried to point out several times that, yes there are places where a "move fast with leadership" approach works better. And yes this only works in the biggest companies capable of sustaining an infra team for a long period of time.