Why I don't like the "staff engineer archetypes"

The most influential piece of writing about staff engineers in the last decade has to be Will Larson’s Staff engineer archetypes. He argues that the “staff engineer” title covers at least four very different roles: the team lead, the architect, the solver, and the right hand. This taxonomy gets cited a lot as advice for people who are trying to become effective staff engineers. For both of my promotions to staff engineer, my manager at the time linked me to the “staff engineer archetypes” and asked me to consider which of these archetypes I was aiming towards. These archetypes definitely exist1. However, I think it’s bad practical advice to tell engineers to try and target them. Archetypes do not make good goals To see why, let’s take the “team lead” archetype. Larson describes this as an informal technical leadership role: not necessarily an explicit authority figure, but someone who’s good at scoping work, planning projects, and maintaining the kind of relationships (e.g. with other…