Scaling yourself
If you look at compensation for very senior engineer in the US (e.g. E7 at Meta, L7 at Databricks or L8 at Google – see levels.fyi for the data), they may not make sense – how can one justify a 7 digits compensation for a single person? There are a lot of considerations that go into compensation (responsibilities, job market etc.), but one of them is impact.
For senior ICs, their impact is not just their direct/personal one, but also the one through others – this is the key to scale yourself. Most of the senior engineers that struggle to grow to staff+, often ignore their (potential) impact through others – they assume they have to ship more features, work longer hours etc.
There are multiple ways to multiply your impact through others:
- You can properly direct a team of engineers – this is probably the most common way. You have to remember that if you lead a team of 10 engineers with poor decisions, you essentially waste the cost of 10 engineers – so you need your leadership trust to be put in such a position.
- You can make engineers more productive by fixing missing infrastructure, getting rid of redundant processes, fixing friction points etc. The framing of the work here might matter a lot – if you fix a problem before it happens, you need to be able to communicate on what the cost of the issue would have been without your work, and if the problem was already present, you still have to estimate the numbers
- You can grow other engineers through mentoring but also by leading through principles/examples.
My last and maybe most important point in this post is that you also don’t need a formal team. I used to have 25 reports at Google and have none today at Databricks (my team isn’t even that large) – but yet I believe I have more impact because I’ve been identifying company-wide issues and addressing them by forming virtual teams. If impact is what drives engineers (and is part of your company’s core value), convincing people to fix an important issue is child-play.
This is also where picking your company matters, you need not only the opportunity (a “large” company that’s growing) and the right environment (a company with little politics where impact is what matters) – if that’s what you are looking for, Databricks is a pretty good pick.