The thing nobody warns you about the staff-engineer track is that your authority quietly evaporates. As a senior engineer you had a team and a manager and a clear lane. As a staff engineer you have a title that sounds important and zero people who report to you. Your job is now to change what dozens of engineers do without being able to tell any of them what to do.
I spent my first year in that seat trying to win on being right. It half-worked, which is worse than not working, because being right and being persuasive turn out to be different skills and I only had one of them. What actually moved the needle came from the coaching training I’d been doing on the side, the parts-work and Transactional Analysis stuff I write about in the TILs. Five moves in particular. None of them require a direct report.
1. The clean question#
A clean question is one that doesn’t smuggle your answer inside it. “Don’t you think we should pull this into a separate service?” is not a question. It’s a proposal wearing a question’s clothes, and everyone in the room can hear the costume.
The clean version is “what’s making this part hard to change?” You’ll get an answer you didn’t script, which is the entire point. Half the time the answer is a constraint you didn’t know about and your separate-service idea was wrong. The other half, the person talks themselves into the refactor and now it’s their idea, which means it’ll actually get done.
This is the move I’m slowest to reach for, because I usually know what I want to happen and a clean question risks the room not getting there. That risk is the cost of the leverage. You can’t have the influence without it.
2. Assume positive intention, then go find it#
I wrote about ego states and the idea that every part of us has a positive intention underneath, even the self-sabotaging ones. The same is true of the code review comment that makes your eye twitch.
The engineer who over-engineered the abstraction wasn’t showing off. They got burned by a rigid design once and they’re trying to never feel that again. The one blocking your PR over a naming nit isn’t a pedant. They maintained a codebase where sloppy names cost them a weekend, and they’re trying to spare you that. Find the intention before you respond and your response stops being a counterattack and starts being a conversation. You don’t have to agree with the part. You just have to stop treating it as the enemy.
3. Playback before pushback#
Before you disagree with someone, say back what you think they said. “So your worry is that the cache invalidation gets harder if we denormalize here?” It costs you one sentence.
It does two things. It catches the times you were about to argue with a position the person never held, which is more often than your ego would like. And it makes the person feel heard, which lowers their defenses enough that they can actually hear you. People do not update their beliefs while bracing for impact. Playback lowers the bracing.
4. Stay in Adult, and invite others there#
Transactional Analysis splits how we show up into Parent, Adult, and Child. Under stress, an incident channel or a heated design review, people slide into Child (defensive, “this isn’t my fault”) or Parent (scolding, “who approved this?”). Both are useless. The work happens in Adult: present, curious, dealing with what’s actually in front of you.
You can’t force someone into their Adult state. You can model it, and it’s contagious. The calmest sentence in a 2 a.m. incident channel resets the temperature for everyone. “Okay, what do we know for sure right now?” is an Adult question, and asking it pulls the Parents and Children in the room toward you. The senior person setting the emotional thermostat is doing more for the outage than the senior person who happens to know the fix.
5. Hold the silence#
After you ask a real question, stop talking. Let the pause be uncomfortable.
The instinct is to fill it, to soften the question or offer a hint, because three seconds of silence feels like a failure. It isn’t. The other person’s default mode network is doing its job in that gap, surfacing the thing they couldn’t quite reach. Fill the silence and you reach in and take the thought out of their hands before it’s formed. The hardest coaching skill is also the one that requires the least technique. Ask, then shut up.
Why these and not a framework#
You could go get a coaching certification, and if the people stuff is becoming your whole job, do it. But you don’t need the framework to start. You need five small habits you can practice in a code review tomorrow: ask without leading, find the intention, play it back, stay in Adult, hold the silence.
The staff engineer who learns these gets a strange superpower. People start bringing you the hard problems before they’re on fire, because talking to you makes them think more clearly. That’s the actual job. The architecture diagrams were always the easy part.
Additional resources#
- Ego states — the parts-work model the positive-intention move comes from
- Taming the DMN — why coaching questions interrupt the rumination loop
- The ‘No Hello’ principle — the smallest version of respecting someone’s attention
