My career lesson is that being right isn't the hard part of being a senior staff engineer

I mean, yes and no. I find staff engineers, and especially the senior-staff-engineer-type positions, to be the ones most sensitive to the exact specifics of the org they've joined. I've seen a senior staff engineer (at a popular unicorn you've all heard of) who was a very smart, but also friendly and reasonable person (how often are those traits in opposition of each other!). They were very good at the staff engineer game. They were vouching for us to upgrade a framework that we pumped 50M of spend through per year. From v2 to v3. It wasn't a huge change, not like python 2 to 3 at all. Positively trivial compared to py2 to 3. But management just were not up for it at all. Even with research done showing we could expect literally a baseline of 10% improvement in performance (so you do the math on that vs the 50M of spend), they just did not want to "waste time on version upgrades." The st…

you gotta a do what you gotta do, but if you have the luxury, and conceptual integrity, there's going to be sacrifices in the name of "alignment" that you're just not prepared to make. I agree with your positioning on lots of "right" solutions, IME it's recognizing and understanding and still not accepting when it violates your foundational values. I've been there and had the ability to not participate, but this isn't always the case.

There's an element of truth to this! I alluded to this (and Adam totally reasonably cut even more of it for time) but I definitely was not as effective organizationally as I could have been; that is one of the major things I learned from my time at LinkedIn. The biggest challenge for DX teams remains figuring out how to (a) communicate but more importantly (b) align their work with the key priorities of the business. I got to be okay at (a) but never particularly succeeded at (b) in my time at LinkedIn. Some of that is on me! Some of it… is on LinkedIn. That said, in this case, the person telling me “You’re too idealistic” literally meant it in the sense of “You should not care about anything unless it directly moves the bottom line,” and I reject that to my bones. The bottom line matters. So, though, do things like user experience, developer experience, and for that matter just basic et…

>>My career lesson is that being right isn't the hard part of being a senior staff engineer. Not only that, but your own definition of 'right' may or may not align with what is 'right' for the people paying your salary - pretending otherwise is just silly. In any organization, you advocate for what you believe is 'right' the best you can, someone else (or a consensus of others) will likely decide if they agree - you get to decide if you are willing to live with it/compromise, or move on - I have done both in my career.

A great choice quote, and add to that LinkedIn as an engineering culture already heavily skews towards “craftsmanship” (as they call it) and refinement versus the larger industry. The speaker appears ridiculously unaware of how outlier his position is. Do you want to wax the wheels of a title-winning race car or of a 1990 Toyota Camry that happens to be in mint condition? A lot of LinkedIn engineers I’ve met are the latter, and Microsoft is trying to push them into being the former. If you are The One True Master Wheel Polisher then sure maybe you get to choose your car, but don’t soapbox it. The audience is smarter than that (I hope).

> To me that's the most interesting quote of the podcast and that's the impression I had gotten before reading this quote. Sounds like they received valuable feedback along the way and ignored it on purpose. We don't really have enough context to make a judgement here IMO. I've been in places large enough to have fairly complex politics where people would manouver themselves into better jobs as much as they could, including performing a hostile takeover of another department. They might not have had the best ideas or the best plans, but they did have the right connections, go to lunch with the right people and say the right words. I've seen bad decisions made because more persuasive and better connected people were attempting to climb the ladder and managed to talk management into it. "You’re too idealistic. You don’t care enough about the bottom line. You should change your values." cou…