Lessons from Nelson Elhage, a Staff Engineer at Stripe:

• One should build up a broad technical and non-technical context across Engineering.
• Many people focus only on their team and their world-view and fail to understand the broad technical context across Engineering.
• Having a broad technical context allows you to be an information glue across teams, because you can detect issues across teams and make proposal to resolve pain points.
• It’s important to build and maintain relationships with engineering management (managers, directors, vice-presidents ..etc), not only because they are the ones who make decisions, but also because you can learn about the issues in the organization as well as understand their point views regarding decisions they make/made.

These are key takeaways, highlights or “learnings” that I captured while reading the book Staff Engineer by Will Larson. You can read the full article here. The above takeaways are by far not a complete summary, but rather my personal highlights or understanding (which can be wrong) and thus do not capture all the wisdom in the original article, so you should read the full article to form your own view & understanding.