My main question after reading some books on Staff Engineering, and Tech Lead roles is about how to be a Staff Engineering when you don´t work with an internal Engineering team in your company.
This situation can be really common in non-tech companies that alwayes worked with partnership and hire development agencies for each specific tech project.<p>How can someone seen as a the customer by the agency´s development team can have a chance to impact in their work. How can the Staff Engineer-Tech Lead be valuable for the agencies and influence them in how to proceed with the technical decisions?<p>From my experience, I think the Staff Engineer will not shine, as he/she will struggle in being the technical lead of a Engineer team that are working in a different company.
In my experience, when there is a position of Engineering Manager, this person is almost never directly involved with the tech.<p>Usually companies wants them to be pure manager and have dedicated staff/principal/architect for the tech decisions, reviews, growing the team.<p>The EM is supposed to do the administrative part: yearly evals, hiring, firing, reporting, planning, and organize the development (like forcing scrum; having good practices for PR; using issue tracker in a specific way,...)
Staff Engineer is a bullshit title created because engineers do not want to be managers and there is no other way to promote them. If companies had a flat structure like Valve, such BS would not be around.