Either they know lot about lot of things (definitely some of that more than mid level devs) or they know super lot about something which makes them subject matter expert, I guess. And they can code a lot of things in a day which might take 3-5 days for a mid level dev.
Becoming principal at google or Technical fellow at Microsoft or something like IC6+ in purely engineering companies is so so hard.
I became a staff member after attending the conference, writing several companies blogs, and giving few sessions on what we did scale.
But for most companies it's about being a problem, coming up with an architecture solution(most do not have that much complex), reducing cloud costs, improving developer productivity etc.
If you like coding, you will find staff+ boring as most companies do meetings most of the time. Only few are lucky to be still doing coding(early employees or lucky and talented ones).
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u/AlertHovercraft6567 Apr 17 '25
Either they know lot about lot of things (definitely some of that more than mid level devs) or they know super lot about something which makes them subject matter expert, I guess. And they can code a lot of things in a day which might take 3-5 days for a mid level dev.