I worked closely with a few during my career in a few companies. It is a retirement plan of people who neither can nor want to perform after they "put in time". These days as someone who gets to give my couple of cents to folks in the upper echelons of promising companies I tell the newly minted CTOs to either not hire them or if they are already hired, fire them.

Staff engineer and above = 45 year old soccer player bench warmer getting the pay 22 year old striker.

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sakopov 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

So you suggest firing people based on their title alone? Sounds pretty damn stupid.

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dare944 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I read it as saying you should fire someone because of their age. Not stupid, malicious.

	▲	notyourday 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> I read it as saying you should fire someone because of their age. Not stupid, malicious. One does not get the title of "Staff Engineer" for age. One also does not get fired for age. One gets fired for sitting on their ass doing virtually nothing. The "Staff Engineers" and above tend to sit on their ass, doing virtually nothing. Any sane company would do well by firing them. When Google was a young company the idea of someone in engineering with a fat title sitting on his ass doing nothing was not tolerated. That's when Google was doing amazing things, was innovative and actually gave a s!it because every single person in that company wanted to get s!it done. Right now Google is a standard issue sh!t company because its upper echelons are full of people who are just warming their fancy chairs, talk about their amazing work life balance and count the days to their next options package vests so they can take yet another multi-months vacation.

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notyourday 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> So you suggest firing people based on their title alone? Sounds pretty damn stupid.

You can look through the threads in this comment section and in other comment sections of threads that touched on Staff Engineers and Senior staff engineers. People perfectly illustrate why the companies would do well firing them - people describe that as their dream "retirement" job.

Yes, I suggest firing every single one of them. They are non-performing group eating enormous compensation packages.

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giuscri 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

so what one should do after a certain age?

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notyourday 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Continue to perform or live off the savings.

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giuscri 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Well you said you’d fire them/not hire them at all. No benefit of doubt

	▲	notyourday 27 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Correct. To get to the staff engineer level you probably spent at least 10 years in the industry making gobs of money. You did save some, right? Right?