How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer

This sounds about right. At least I feel it acutely in my career. And the more experienced I got instead of more autonomy it has decreased. So to me it seems autonomy is decreasing at a rather fast clip.

Even outside projects and general work condition it is worse. 10 years back I could just decide when to work from home, or do a few interesting projects show to managers get approval afterwards. Today I have to explain myself to managers and get proper approvals for same thing. And I have been in same place for quite some time so it is not even the case that I have to prove to my new employers first.

Being not much ambitious I use to think after these many years and multiple successful project my win is to be a kind of made guy in that same mid-level position. Supporting , fixing project which I delivered over years and just take it easy, start day late, leave early until retirement.

Turns out things I assumed, don't exist. And even if they do they are above my level. Not worked in big tech, no massive RSU based compensation and with AI flattening difference (in employer's view ) between 2 vs 20 years of experience, story is not going to end great for people like me.

Without providing too much detail, at my current place of employment I find that to be the case.

In most of my career, especially when in a Staff role, it has been up to me to propose the direction and priority of work within my scope. Usually, this is based on my estimation of the impact to the business (possible new features, security) or operations (devx, efficiency $$$). Obviously I still have to work with product to get things scheduled as they have needs that must be met, but it was as an equal partner. As a very creative person thats usually the space I enjoy the most.

I agree with this and think that when your company isn't profitable and is running out of runway (due to the end of the zirp) and can't get more, moving toward features that more directly could land sales is a natural top-down move (and totally correct in the abstract).

However I still see a lot of "work theater" where directors couldn't care at all about changing the bottom line but just care that work that sounds plausible enough is executed in a predictable way that makes them look good (in fact they get pretty disappointed if something happens TOO fast [like half the estimate] as it illustrates they are out of touch the work they are claiming to represent). What I'm saying is that "do more top-down-product" in theory makes sense as a direction, but in practice I usually see it as wasted energy.

I've had about the same level over the years. Early on, before I had a nest egg, I had little real autonomy, despite outward protestations top-down asking for risks and ideas. Afterward, maximizing average outcomes rather than worst-case risk, I've had a ton of career success either proposing and executing good ideas or else just ignoring the product roadmap when necessary to make the company better. I encourage my team to do the same (ideally they have to resort to subterfuge less than I did since I highly value bottom-up input, but either way is fine). It's, again, risky, but if you consistently deliver above expectations then in many environments you'll get more promotions and raises than you know what to do with, despite the lack of predictability.

Lately, product and my boss have been on board, so it's been fantastic to actually have partners to discuss these "risky" ideas with and better fit them into the roadmap rather than guarantee things which would get us all promoted will be shot down instead. I personally have more bottom-up autonomy than I think I've ever had at $WORK.

That's only anecdata. Another aspect of that tech microcosm is that at various points I explicitly did not have permission to do the right thing and had to be careful with the politics. It only worked out because I was right and because I was okay with the consequences if I had been wrong. Maybe that means I had low autonomy in your definition?

Most of my career has been spent in JavaScript and then MuleSoft. I have only ever seen top-down authority in about 20 years of doing this, except for when I was at Travelocity early in my career.

The general perception is that JavaScript work in the corporate world is for young people who have no idea what they are doing and lack the maturity to write original solutions. This perception is common from developers who do other work, management, and developers who primarily perform JavaScript work. If I want to be creative or have autonomy to do anything more ambitious than putting text to screen I have to save it for personal side projects or do unrelated work.

MuleSoft work was just more of the same with all decisions funneled to strict silos of a select few and everybody else was just a keyboard pressing stooge.

Yes, that does sound dreadful, but what's worse is that it amplifies the personalities of people who will throw others under the bus for attention and potential rock stars who perform their most diligent work at hiding from that attention.

I noticed what you describe 5 years ago.

Since then, not only have we lost autonomy, but there was no top-down direction to begin with. And there is none now.

Nobody knows what the next incentive to chase is, so they're liquidating headcount and engaging in fraud to appear profitable.

(re: fraud, I'm learning the hard way why my own employer's stock price dramatically improved-- ever since they switched to stack ranking, they just make shit up to PIP and deny severance ahead of layoffs.)

I've certainly seen that shift in some places. 8 years ago I started on a project as a freelance software engineer, to build something they couldn't really envision yet. I had a ton of freedom, built a prototype, chose my own tech stack, designed every part of it. A team was built around it, and I migrated to a leadership role where I decided the direction, addressed issues I saw, redesigned parts that needed improvement. We had an enormous amount of freedom, and used it to build great things fast.

A bit over a year ago, I joined that same company again, as lead of what's technically the same team, this time as an employee, but everything had changed. It was very hierarchical, very top-down, very little freedom, lots of red tape and office politics, and a tedious, slow pace.

Its a good thing that the Author pointed out the caveat cause most companies/teams/people do not operate in this mode. Subtle in the details is a fact hidden that the author is able to manage what he wants to do, most people do not get that kind of luxury. This either means that the author has earned enough political reputation based on past work or they are aligned with their management chain.

tldr; this advice is probably impractical for a bigger chunk of industry.

This is my current world, at least. Bit of a shame. But they pay me well enough still and the work is interesting enough that I don’t mind too much.

I think it was correlated with outsourcing and H1B replacements, because you can’t outsource the leadership required for bottom-up methods.

Further, foreign business culture is significantly more too-down than American business culture.

I think the autonomy was stripped not that long ago and it's making software products far worse.

It doesnt make sense that this would happen from an economic perspective at first glance - not unless you consider labor (devs), execs and investors to be three competing groups who are vying for power.

this

It depends on company culture, and there's as many of those as there are kinds of people. I've worked at large, medium, and small companies, in many industries, and there's no common pattern. The people in charge set the tone, and the people are all different.

If there's a pattern in the people, it's that more people in charge are less capable of doing the job, because they've grown up in a culture of ignorance. The past 10 years has been dominated by "StackOverflow Engineers" promoted to management, and people who read HN clickbait blog posts and believe it's good advice (it's not). They never had the time, training, or mentorship to learn from decades of experience. And Dunning-Kruger keeps them confident that they don't need to change.

However, on this point:

"the overall engineering autonomy has decreased over the years as the culture of tech has (in my opinion) shifted away from tech focus to more business, management, product focus with engineers just as the widgets who are tasked with fulfilling the goals of business, management, product"

That's exactly what engineers are supposed to do: listen to and enable the business. A mechanical engineer does not dictate the shape of the car. The designer tells the mechanical engineer what the car will look like. It's up to the engineer to make it work. However, it's also up to the engineer to tell the business that you can't fit a 600hp engine in a Mazda Miata without seriously affecting handling. It's supposed to be a two-way street. Good management/leadership knows this and enables it.

Exactly. Everywhere I've worked had at least 3-4X more bugs than we had capacity to fix, and the bug count grew over time, net of any fixing happening. There was never difficulty finding problems to solve. Unfortunately most places don't give engineering the autonomy to solve critical issues. It's just feature cram and redesigns, over and over, and let the bugs pile up.

I think this is more relevant reality. At Staff and Principal you have visibility into a lot of fires going around you. What helps is understanding the relative importance of what fire to douse and be at peace with the ones that you cannot control.

There are a lot of known problems... but there are also a lot of unknown, or at least unrecognized problems. Some of those unrecognized problems are going to be more useful and higher-leverage than recognized problems. The same "being a sponge" approach still helps.

You probably pivoted your career towards the startup space so you found it effortless. For others it is basically a castle with a 20m wall.

I am doing exactly same thing of creating a solution which can be applied to multiple problems at the same time.

Sometimes coworkers does not like that because they don't see me working on the problem, but on a tool which will resolve the problem and similar problems from our backlog.

He says: That taught me to let potential problems pile up. Listening the way I do leaves me with far more of them than I could possibly solve, and not all deserve action. Most don’t need to turn into projects the first time I hear about them; waiting can be a superpower.

This is not distinct.

Even in a big corp there are always problems to solve. The point is to find problems that both:

1) are hard enough that someone junior won't be able to solve them alone, and

2) actually provide value to the company / users

It’s the same in a large corporate environment. I have a “personal projects” doc of ideas I’ve had to make development experiences better at my current role - it’s a couple hundred lines long.

I managed to get a couple of smaller tools out recently thanks to having copilot available to churn on them while I spend my time on prescribed work, but it would consume all of my time to even make a significant dent in it.

yea this was the case even before ai. fighting for scope is 80% of the job now. Ppl like OP dont really need to "Act like a sponge" and figure out "problems to work on" if there is natural demand for stuff they are building work will present itself.

There is also crazy ladder climbing with all these titles and difference in payscale. So ppl like the author are trying to optimize what a role X is supposed to be doing. Everyone is just the same thing everywhere.

Everywhere you go its the same ppl, same ladder , same tools same sucking up to boss blah blah. Cant wait to get out of this shit.

I’ve experienced this. The critical realization for me was that most of those problems which I know I can solve quickly, without even having to write a Jira ticket or groom them into a sprint or whatever, are problems I should let someone else solve.

Sure, I can do them faster than others and pretty well. But if they’re truly things I can knock out in a day or two, they’re things that other staff can knock out in a week or two, and learn from the experience, and at that size they likely don’t require the standard of quality that I delude myself that I hold myself to.

At the lead/staff level, it’s far better to look for the kind of problems described in TFA: problems that are complex to identify, and for which the appropriate solutions aren’t always the obvious ones. My time is spent much better looking for those than being a 10x-speed senior engineer or whatever. There are actual senior engineers for that; I’m paid for the kind of work that they don’t or can’t do (yet, and to help model and mentor and train them to be able to do it), not to do the kind of work they already can do—whether I would do it faster/better doesn’t matter.

It’s case-by-case of course; sometimes a simple issue is critical or obscure enough (or tempting enough to override my iffy-at-best self-discipline) that I’ll jump on it. But I generally try to remember that a lot of the stuff I could look heroic for fixing in a jiffy is probably both not worth my salary allocation in the eyes of my grandboss, not critical time-wise, and a potential learning/accomplishment opportunity for others.

I think that's a completely natural source of frustration for someone who is used to being able to put hands to keyboard and solve problems quickly, but IMO the higher you climb the ladder, the more you have the opportunity and responsibility to take a longer view and to delegate - which often means that other people are pushing the code.

Thanks for letting me know; I cannot reproduce this myself on my mobile (it should be white text on a dark grey background) but I pushed a speculative fix which might improve things. Please let me know if it helps or, if not, I would love to know more details so I can fix this!

Thanks!

I spent the early part of my career (mid 2000s) working on a registration system for sports tournaments.

I had two jobs:

1. Writing the actual software for the registration website

2. Going to the events and managing the registration tent where people actually checked in

Doing 2 gave me a VASTLY better understanding of who the users were and how they thought. e.g. I assumed it would be tech savvy, organized people like me in their mid 20s. It was actually a mix of 40 something team dads who weren't tech savvy at all (b/c mid 2000s) but very organized and teenagers who were the opposite.

It meant effectively managing two completely different customer bases in the same product.

Coupled with the fact that cable modems were a new thing but not evenly distributed meant that we had to design the site accordingly.

At the time, I remember Joe Spolsky mentioning that at Microsoft they did two way mirror usability testing and it totally made sense. I wish more firms did that today.