I find this infra perspective so fascinating, as a career-long product platform engineer and solidly staff+. I don't argue that sean's writing (which is amazing) is a little overly mercenary in framing, but I'll pick a few choice sections I don't agree with here too. tldr I think the "product cares about speed; infra cares about leverage" staff engineer archetype is a false dichotomy we shouldn't encourage.
"In the product environments Sean describes, where goals pivot quarterly and features are often experimental, speed is the ultimate currency. You need to ship, iterate, and often move on before the market shifts." -- I disagree that speed is the ultimate currency! A great product org also respects long term leverage, it's just _always_ harder to argue for. But it's best to build a strong portfolio of going fast (where needed), going slow (where high leverage), and if everyone agrees your "going slow" led to huge returns you get the best of all worlds. Frankly it's a sign of a relatively junior product engineer if they are myopically focused on speed at the cost of all else.
"But the more powerful return is systemic innovation. If you rotate teams every year, you are limited to solving acute bugs that are visible right now. Some problems, however, only reveal their shape over long horizons." -- Extremely true, and this is _equally or more true_ in product domains. My most valuable contributions have come from sitting in a product area long enough to generalize 5 micro optimizations into the macro engineering leverage we needed to drive an order of magnitude more value from the same engineering input.
"For some engineers, navigating this [high visibility driven] chaos is a thrill. For those of us who care about system stability, it feels like a trap." -- my protip for prospective staff engineers is to _never_ say you only care about [speed, stability]. In most cases you must care about both, and it's worth advertising yourself as such. If you self select out of companies that only care about [pure stability/pure ship velocity] there should be a valuable balance to strike and staff engineers are in a unique place to enshrine that balance in engineered systems.
"In a product organization, you often need to impress your manager’s manager. In an infrastructure organization, you need to impress your customers’ managers." -- surely we can agree impressing customer stakeholders is even more important in (healthy) product orgs :) But it's a curious claim!
Great article, wonderful to hear more nuanced and deep discussion of the practice of extremely senior IC engineering. Kudos!
Firstly, thanks for the thoughtful comments across the post. Really happy you found it insightful!
> But it's best to build a strong portfolio of going fast (where needed), going slow (where high leverage), and if everyone agrees your "going slow" led to huge returns you get the best of all worlds.
I guess maybe I oversold this a little in the post but I definitely think that product orgs value speed more than infra orgs: there's often an mismatch when I speak to product engineers on how fast they expect us to build things for them vs how fast we can actually go while considering all our other customers and not breaking other usecases.
> my protip for prospective staff engineers is to _never_ say you only care about [speed, stability]
Fully agreed, both are important for engineers to have. As above, I think the relative composition of them varies though depending on the area (just pulling numbers from the top of my head, maybe it's 70/30 in favor of speed in product orgs, 30/70 in favor of stability in infra orgs).
> surely we can agree impressing customer stakeholders is even more important in (healthy) product orgs
You're absolutely right for what I say in the post; reflecting I think I maybe did not go into this topic in enough detail for the nuance it deserves (but the post already felt long enough!).
Let's split the discussion into 3 different areas (as IMO they each work slightly different): infra/devex, B2C and B2B.
* Infra/devex: as I say in the post, it's critical to impress your other team's managers as that's how you prove impact.
* B2C: your customers are consumers so it's all MAUs, revenue etc. There is no "customer stakeholder" who will give you direct feedback for your promo packet
* B2B: here's where it gets interesting. So if your management chain is directly able to talk to customers (and especially senior managers) to solicit feedback without middle layers (parter manager, account managers, PMs) then yes you're absolutely correct. But often this is not the case: the middle layers act as a filtering point so you get only a fuzzy sense of how stakeholders in the other company about a specific technical thing you worked on. So again it's sort of at the whim of how your manager feels the other company's managers feels.
The basic point I was trying to make is that if you're working on external facing product, from my understanding, even if you impress your external stakeholders, it's not like in your promo packet you can attribute concrete quotes to the customers. quotes like "we couldn't have done X in our company without the work of Y engineer in your org who worked on Z". Whereas this sort of quote is extremely common to see in infra promo packets.
Hope this made sense, I'm not sure I communicated this last point well!
"In the product environments Sean describes, where goals pivot quarterly and features are often experimental, speed is the ultimate currency. You need to ship, iterate, and often move on before the market shifts." -- I disagree that speed is the ultimate currency! A great product org also respects long term leverage, it's just _always_ harder to argue for. But it's best to build a strong portfolio of going fast (where needed), going slow (where high leverage), and if everyone agrees your "going slow" led to huge returns you get the best of all worlds. Frankly it's a sign of a relatively junior product engineer if they are myopically focused on speed at the cost of all else.
"But the more powerful return is systemic innovation. If you rotate teams every year, you are limited to solving acute bugs that are visible right now. Some problems, however, only reveal their shape over long horizons." -- Extremely true, and this is _equally or more true_ in product domains. My most valuable contributions have come from sitting in a product area long enough to generalize 5 micro optimizations into the macro engineering leverage we needed to drive an order of magnitude more value from the same engineering input.
"For some engineers, navigating this [high visibility driven] chaos is a thrill. For those of us who care about system stability, it feels like a trap." -- my protip for prospective staff engineers is to _never_ say you only care about [speed, stability]. In most cases you must care about both, and it's worth advertising yourself as such. If you self select out of companies that only care about [pure stability/pure ship velocity] there should be a valuable balance to strike and staff engineers are in a unique place to enshrine that balance in engineered systems.
"In a product organization, you often need to impress your manager’s manager. In an infrastructure organization, you need to impress your customers’ managers." -- surely we can agree impressing customer stakeholders is even more important in (healthy) product orgs :) But it's a curious claim!
Great article, wonderful to hear more nuanced and deep discussion of the practice of extremely senior IC engineering. Kudos!