Beware Not All Staff Positions Are Staff Roles

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Titles don’t mean the same thing across companies. This is especially true for software engineers in the upper levels of the IC track. Not all companies use identical titles, or even if they do, some order them differently. This is compounded by Staff+ roles being vague and varied across companies and even within a single company. Just look at levels.fyi, if you don’t believe me. Catching this before you join is a whole separate topic. But what can you do if you think you accidentally landed yourself in a role that is Staff+ in title only?

Identify What Went Wrong

There are several different failure modes, and remediation will depend on why you’re underutilized. So, the first order of business is determining the root of the problem. Are you just in an onboarding period? Or perhaps the company or your department has massive title inflation? Maybe expectations are off?

Onboarding Period

The first failure mode I will mention is a mismatch in expectations for an onboarding period. I came in as a Senior Staff Engineer at my current job, but initially, I was operating primarily as a Senior SWE. My manager wanted to give me the time and…