Staying on the high-level individual contributor track trades creative expertise against control.

Beyond senior lays staff engineer. Engineers on this track get larger and more interesting projects as well as the expert status with regard to other engineers. This role will suffer from being left out of the room where decisions are made and context is shared among the higher level stakeholders, but this is traded in favor of productive time rather than time spent in boring and unproductive meethings mulling over what needs to be done.rF2


  1. Camille Fournier, The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change, ed. Laurel Ruma, First Edition (Beijing: O’Reilly, 2017). (See notes.)