Take ways from StaffPlus london
Having followed LeadDev conferences and content for many years, I was thrilled to finally attend the StaffPlus conference in London. Unfortunately, the onset of summer vacation meant that I had to postpone summarizing the conference until now.
The conference proved to be a valuable experience, not only due to the insightful presentations but also because of the opportunity it provided for networking with fellow Staff+ engineers. I particularly appreciated how our host, Tanya, encouraged us to strike up conversations with individuals we hadn’t previously met before nearly every break.
There were numerous outstanding talks, but here are the key takeaways that resonated with me the most:
As staff+ engineers, we are expected to have a impact and influence that spans multiple product areas or even the whole company. That means scaling your self and one of the most effective way to scale your influence is through writing. Among the tools and tips presented, I found the advice to start with rough drafts and include a concise “tl;dr” (Too Long; Didn’t Read) section in documents particularly valuable. Lastly, I got pointed to the agile comms handbook which I recently read.
No StaffPlus conference would be complete without a discussion on time management. Staff Engineers must become adept at balancing maker and manager schedules. Understanding the business context is crucial for making the most of our limited time. The emphasis here is on managing our energy rather than just our time. This talk provided insightful strategies for tackling this challenge.
I been interested in system thinking for a while so I enjoyed the talk about systems thinking for software engineers. It points to system thinking tools that can be useful when diagnosing software problems or challenges. I really feel the need to try these tools because for me there is still a gap between the theory and seeing the tools used in practice.
Last presentation was actually then one matched my timely needs to most. I had been in the Staff engineer role for a little over 6 months and felt I didn’t yet have a process for setting goals and re-aligning with leadership. One of the keys ideas was finding a cadence for iterating on the goals on either a quarterly or 6 months schedule. It can’t be stressed often enough to avoid busy work and focus on high impact work. The way of setting up goals and mapping the to career level expectations in a spreadsheet seems very interesting. I later tried this approach and found it useful even it requires some decision making when an objective matches multiple categories. After some time I have also adopted the idea of making the goals publicly available as a document.
There was also plenty of interesting technical talks for example about running continuous migrations in an huge microservices environment. But instead of summarizing every talk I found it more valuable to focus on the topics that have direct impact for me to improve in my role. I must end with that I really enjoyed attending this conference. Even if you can see the talks online the networking component is a huge plus and I find the focus on the talks to generally be better when attending a conference.