Beyond Staff Engineer

Hello, 👋

We’re back after a short break. I would’ve thought things will be quiet over Christmas but, oh boy, I was wrong. There were so many excellent articles that narrowing it down to 5 was a real challenge.

Also, I’ve added a couple new sections. Industry trends and security. Both of them are essential for tech leaders so I hope you find them useful.

Beyond Staff Engineer
11 minutes by Alex Ewerlöf

This article talks about the challenges and toolset for the technical leadership level that comes after staff engineer: senior staff engineer, principal engineer, technical director. Senior Staff Engineers must focus on scaling technical leadership across larger organizations, work with longer time horizons, and develop different skills for broader impact.

The Essential Guide to Software Delivery Management
sponsored by Jellyfish

Struggling to forecast 2025 roadmap delivery dates? You're not alone. Engineering leaders face immense pressure to meet deadlines while driving innovation. Learn how to quantify engineering capacity, create achievable project plans, and confidently communicate delivery dates. Download this guide and transform your approach to software delivery.

Twenty Tiny Leadership Lessons
11 minutes by Subbu Allamaraju

Most leadership learning is experiential. We observe, learn, and emulate from others, often subconsciously. Yet, the core of such learning starts shallow, leading to behavioral and decision-making mistakes, learned and uncorrected bad behaviors, and dysfunction.

Small teams
7 minutes by David Hoang

David argues that smaller teams can be more effective when they possess key characteristics: high talent density, diverse skill sets, substantial craft experience, and strong mutual trust. The piece explains how such teams can reduce dependencies, increase quality and velocity, and foster greater ownership, making them particularly effective for tasks like technology investigation, rapid prototyping, and crisis response.

Principal Engineer Roles Framework
15 minutes by Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec

Based on 12 years of experience at Amazon S3, the author presents a framework for Principal Engineer roles that helps optimize their impact within organizations. The framework defines six distinct roles: Sponsor (project/program lead), Guide (domain expert), Catalyst (idea launcher), Tie Breaker (decision maker), Catcher (project rescuer), and Participant (contributor without explicit leadership role).

How to effectively refine engineering strategy
12 minutes by Will Larson

Will introduces three main refinement techniques: strategy testing (for ambiguous problems), systems modeling (for identifying leverage points), and Wardley mapping (for understanding ecosystem evolution). He argues that while refinement is often skipped, especially in high-altitude strategies, it's essential for success and can help organizations avoid costly mistakes by testing ideas cheaply before full implementation.

Tests are dead. Meticulous AI is here.
sponsored by Meticulous

Meticulous AI is a tool which automatically creates and maintains a continuously evolving e2e UI test suite that covers every corner of your application – with no developer intervention required whatsoever. Backed by CTO of GitHub, Guillermo Rauch (next.js author), yc and others, it's built from the Chromium level up with a deterministic scheduling engine – making it the only testing tool that eliminates flakes.

industry

• A software architecture reading list

• Databases in 2024

• Things we learned about LLMs in 2024

• The Evolution of SRE at Google

security

• Passkey technology is elegant, but it’s most definitely not usable security

• From Pegasus to Predator: The evolution of Commercial Spyware on iOS

• Security challenges for Development Platforms in 2024

• New Microsoft guidance for the CISA Zero Trust Maturity Model

• Is permanent admin access elevation to User Access Administrator role a risk?

Next, we’ll look at the most read articles from 2024.

1. Design Docs at Google

2. Using Metrics to Measure Individual Developer Performance

3. Your First Year as a CTO: A Comprehensive Guide

4. Becoming An Engineering Manager Can Make You Better At Life And Relationships

5. How to hire low experience, high potential people

And we'll wrap up with the most read article from the last issue.

• The Adaptive Chief Technology Officer

How do you like the new sections? Would you like me to keep them?

Happy New Year,
Jakub 🥳

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