Why I Ignore The Spotlight as a Staff Engineer

Lately I’ve been reading Sean Goedecke’s essays on being a Staff+ engineer. His work (particularly Software engineering under the spotlight and It’s Not Your Codebase) is razor-sharp and feels painfully familiar to anyone in Big Tech. On paper, I fit the mold he describes: I’m a Senior Staff engineer at Google. Yet, reading his work left me with a lingering sense of unease. At first, I dismissed…