The Engineering Leadership Report 2026
Our survey of 600 engineering leaders exploring how the role is evolving, where the challenges lie, and what the future holds for the job.
Staff archetypes
Most career ladders define a single, uniform set of expectations for Staff engineers operating within the company. Everyone benefits from clear role expectations, but career ladders are a tool that applies better against populations than people. This is particularly true for Staff-plus engineers, whose career ladders often paper over several distinct roles hidden behind a single moniker. The more folks I spoke with about the role of Staff-plus engineers at their company, the better their experiences began to cluster into four distinct patterns. Most companies emphasized one or two of the patterns, and one pattern only existed in companies with many hundreds or thousands of engineers. A few companies didn’t feature any technical leadership pattern and pushed all their experienced engineers towards engineering management. In literature, recurring character patterns are called archetypes, such as the “hero” or the “trickster,” and the archetype term is helpful for labeling these frequent variants of Staff-plus engineers.
Engineering Career Paths at Big Tech and High-Growth Startups
Levels at big tech, the most common career paths, and what comes after making it to Staff
Scaling Engineering Teams: Lessons from Google, Facebook, and Netflix
After spending over a decade in engineering leadership roles at some of the world’s most chaotic innovation factories—Google, Facebook, and Netflix—I’ve learned one universal truth: scaling e…
Engineering managers have a new job description
Why engineering managers are expected to be hands-on again and how AI tools are making it possible to stay technically sharp while still leading.
3 tactics for leading a team through uncertainty
Lessons learned leading a team through a bumpy acquisition.
How to Do AI-Assisted Engineering
15 experienced engineers and engineering leaders share their real-world experiences with AI-assisted engineering.
Now Hiring: Senior Open Source Maintainer
A rare opportunity to make a real impact in a fast-paced, high-visibility role.
A Guide to Measuring Engineering Team Performance
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” While software development practices constantly change, there will always be a tier of truly top engineering teams who stand above…
Shifting the Level of Selection in Science
Criteria for recognizing and rewarding scientists primarily focus on individual contributions. This creates a conflict between what is best for scientists’ careers and what is best for science. In this article, we show how the theory of multilevel selection provides conceptual tools for modifying incentives to better align individual and collective interests. A core principle is the need to account for indirect effects by shifting the level at which selection operates from individuals to the groups in which individuals are embedded. This principle is used in several fields to improve collective outcomes, including animal husbandry, team sports, and professional organizations. Shifting the level of selection has the potential to ameliorate several problems in contemporary science, including accounting for scientists’ diverse contributions to knowledge generation, reducing individual-level competition, and promoting specialization and team science. We discuss the difficulties associated with shifting the level of selection and outline directions for future development in this domain.
The engineering manager's attention budget
Every Engineering Manager has 5 jobs - most distribute their 100 'attention points' across only 2-3 of them
2026 Retention Report
The 2026 Retention Report delivers data-driven insights leaders use to reduce employee turnover and improve workforce performance.
Staff Engineer and Public Speaker | Szymon Chudy
Staff engineer who cares about the why, not just the how. Writing about frontend, productivity, and growing in tech.
Who's Still Hiring? Find a Tech Job with Open Roles
A Corp Bro creation, Keyplay enriched, community-sourced, no-pay-to-play, ungated, BS-free, list of tech companies who are still ACTUALLY hiring.
Stories from six engineering leaders who succeeded in building and growing diverse teams. Hiring approaches, retention tactics and strategies.