Good reads: Understanding Archetypes

Understanding EMs, Staff and Principal Engineers

1. 5 Engineering Manager Archetypes: Patrick talks about five types of EMs, each with their own strengths and challenges. Knowing where you fit in can help you play to your strengths and work on your weak spots. Having a mix of these archetypes in an organization can foster a well-rounded engineering leadership.
2. Staff Engineer Archetypes: Similarly, Will explains the different roles of Staff Engineers. Like with EMs, different Staff Engineers bring diverse strengths to the table. A blend of these archetypes can enrich the technical leadership and contribute to a balanced and effective engineering team.
3. Mai-Lan in his fantastic post talks about his experience with archetypes of Principal Engineers and how they fit in the scheme of a bigger org.

Principal Engineer Roles Framework

I have worked on Amazon S3 for ~12 years and if there is one thing that I have learned, it is that when you run complex systems at scale, you must think deeply about how teams work. It’s not enough to be get into the details about what you build.

Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec

What are your thoughts on the different roles of EMs and Staff Engineers?