Staff Eng is a name that the industry has coalesced around to describe a certain kind of role, and as time gone on, the industry has become more aware of.
The basic difference is only about %10-%15 of ICs are staff or greater and are engineering leadership. A staff eng in many cases is closer to a manager without people management or a PM than a typical engineer who should be spending %50-%90 of their time writing code or similar. Staff engineers also tend to work not just within their team, but are engineering leads of projects that involve multiple teams.
Some staff engineers can spend more time than typical writing code, but %80 of most staff engineers are typically not. The %20 that are still writing a lot are still usually some kind of engineering leader in their project, subfield or similar.
I wasn't really looking for an explanation, I've been doing this for a while so.. thanks, I guess. But it seems you're quite knowledgeable. Why not put this to good use and sign up as a guest on some of the staff engineer podcasts to talk about how to talk about working and cross-team synergies? I'm also curious about various flavors of staff engineering. Like senior staff for example. Do senior staff engineers wear patches or shoulder loops?
In my company staff engineers are the highest level of non-manager engineers excluding principals. It's a position above team leads reserved for engineers whose role is basically leading in stack and architectural choices that the various team apply. A staff engineer e.g. may research and implement some new i18 library that solves major pains across the org.
Stadf engineers generally require good engineering and coding skills and large domain knowledge that engineers working on few projects do not possess.
But it's also a promotion path for seniors whose job hasnt changed much in years.
The basic difference is only about %10-%15 of ICs are staff or greater and are engineering leadership. A staff eng in many cases is closer to a manager without people management or a PM than a typical engineer who should be spending %50-%90 of their time writing code or similar. Staff engineers also tend to work not just within their team, but are engineering leads of projects that involve multiple teams.
Some staff engineers can spend more time than typical writing code, but %80 of most staff engineers are typically not. The %20 that are still writing a lot are still usually some kind of engineering leader in their project, subfield or similar.