The Senior IC

Use when — you’re aiming for staff/principal and “be more senior” is the only definition you’ve got.

Staff+ work clusters into four archetypes, and your mode dictates what “good” looks like day to day. Most people are a blend with one dominant mode — operate from it on purpose.

✓Done when — You can finish “My archetype is ___, so my main output is ___” — and your manager agrees with the sentence.

Will Larson, “Staff Engineer” / StaffEng.com — the staff archetypes.

Use when — you keep shipping more and better work, but reviews say “great engineer, not yet staff” and you can’t see what’s missing.

Senior is the terminal level where you’re paid to be excellent at the assigned work. Staff+ is paid for scope and judgment beyond your own output. You’re optimising the wrong axis: output, not leverage.

✓Done when — You have one outcome this quarter where the impact came from a decision or a capability you grew in others, not lines you wrote.

Will Larson / StaffEng.com — “What do Staff engineers actually do?”; Camille Fournier, “The Manager’s Path”.

Use when — you feel guilty when you’re not the top committer, or you measure your day by how much you personally shipped.

You still code — but coordination and leadership become a material part of the work, and you deliberately step back from being the highest-throughput maker so the team’s total output goes up. Most-code is a sign of hoarding, not a badge.

✓Done when — A chunk of work you’d historically have done yourself shipped well, by someone you set up to do it.

Camille Fournier, “The Manager’s Path” (Tech Lead); Reilly, “The Staff Engineer’s Path” (Execution).

Use when — designing a new system and you feel the pull toward a shiny database, language, or framework you haven’t run in production.

Assume ~3 innovation tokens for a whole system — a small, slow-to-replenish budget. Every novel, poorly-understood technology spends one. Spend tokens on the part of the stack that’s actually your product’s edge; choose boring everywhere else.

✓Done when — You can name every place you spent a token and justify why that novelty serves the product, not your résumé.

Dan McKinley, “Choose Boring Technology” (mcfunley.com, 2015).

Use when — promo or review season arrives and you can’t reconstruct what you shipped, or self-promotion feels like bragging.

A running doc of your accomplishments and their impact, updated continuously, solves legibility without requiring you to be loud in the moment. Crucially, log glue work too — framed as impact, with a number.

1. One doc, date-stamped sections per quarter.
2. After anything lands, add a line: what you did + the measurable outcome + who it helped.
3. Include glue explicitly: “cut onboarding from 3 weeks to 1.”
4. At review time, edit down — don’t reconstruct from scratch.

✓Done when — A living brag doc where each entry names the impact and who benefited — ready to paste into a packet.

Julia Evans, “Get your work recognized: write a brag document” (jvns.ca).

Use when — harsh critique is landing on your proposal, your chest tightens, and you’re rehearsing rebuttals instead of listening.

Separate self from artifact out loud, turn prosecution into co-authorship, and capture critiques as work items, not verdicts. You don’t have to resolve anything live.

✓Done when — You named the worst objection back, captured the critiques with owners, and scheduled the decision instead of litigating it live.

Will Larson, “Learn to never be wrong”; Tanya Reilly, “The Staff Engineer’s Path”.