I am not criticizing the author or his opinion in any way. But what he didn’t emphasize enough that yes he might ignore the spotlight as a staff engineer. But he can only do so because he is a staff software engineer.

When I was working at a startup from 2018-2020, I was hired as the second technical hire by then new CTO who was tasked to bring tech leadership into the company from an outside consulting agency where all of the long term developers were in India.

They were constantly seeking the spotlight to insure they kept their jobs. I could afford to not seek the spotlight. I already had the trust of the owners, CTO etc. I had no fear of being made redundant because the right people didn’t know what I contributed.

I wasn’t trying to get a promotion, I was already leading all of the big technical cross functional initiatives as the company grew.

On the other hand, when I got into BigTech in 2020 as an L5 (Professional Services consulting not SDE), I saw for the first time how much politics played in getting ahead. I personally didn’t care. My goal from day 1 was to make money and leave after 4 years. I was already 46 and knew I didn’t want to stay long term.

But I did see how hard it was for a damn good intern I mentored their senior year and when they came back to get noticed. I had to create opportunities for them to get noticed because they were ignored by their manager [1]. They still had to change departments to just get a chance to get on a promotion track.

I see it again on the other side. I would hate to have to play the games and go through the gauntlet to get promoted at the company I work at now and where I was brought in at the staff level.

But I would be chasing after the spotlight with the best of them to get ahead.

I do have the luxury to not chase recognition - everyone who is important already knows me and what I do. My projects automatically give me visibility without my chasing them.

[1] all of the early career people reported to a separate manager and were loaned out to teams.

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lalitmaganti an hour ago | parent [-]

> But he can only do so because he is a staff software engineer.

I don't agree with this at all. This is how I've worked for my entire time at Google, all the way from new grad L3 joining the company till today. Ignoring the spotlight does not mean "don't get attention from other people" but "don't chase the project execs are focusing on".

Whenever I've work on a project, I make a very active effort to make sure engineers are aware of it, especially if I think they would find it useful. But that's different than going to my execs and asking "what's the highest priority at the moment" and working on that.

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raw_anon_1111 an hour ago | parent [-]

And how does that look on your promo doc?

Would you rather be working on some obscure internal website for employees to track their performance that no one cares about or something related to Google ads? Which would you suggest a new grad work on?

It sounds cynical. But I never personal tried to get ahead at BigTech, it was never my goal, I just saw the struggles that others had navigating the promo process from L4 (entry level) -> L5 and L6->L7. It seemed like L5->L6 was the easiest for some reason.

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lalitmaganti 39 minutes ago | parent [-]

I would say it's worked out pretty well for me at least given my career trajectory! Feel free to draw your own conclusions from my resume (it's on my about page).

I think you are conflating "exec attention" with "important projects": these are very much not the same thing.

	▲	raw_anon_1111 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Fair point. So if you are saying “get on important projects” is the lever, we are in complete agreement. You can put important projects on your promo doc and if you communicate it well, you are golden. That’s far more important than “executive attention” when it comes to the promotion committee. Just don’t be the guy who is working on the internal comp tracking system that no one thinks about more than once a year