Why I'm Reading This
As I grow toward senior and staff-level roles, the job shifts from "write great code" to "ensure great code gets written across the organization." This book provides a roadmap for that transition.
Notes So Far
The section on choosing what to work on resonates strongly. At OCI, I observed that the most impactful engineers weren't necessarily the best coders — they were the ones who identified the right problems to solve and aligned cross-functional teams to solve them.
The discussion of "glue work" — the essential but often invisible work of documentation, onboarding, code review, and cross-team coordination — validates work I've seen undervalued in performance reviews. Reilly argues that this work is a feature of Staff engineering, not a distraction from it.
Currently on Chapter 5
More notes to come as I progress through the book.