Yea, that's essential what high level technical people are. They're making decisions on generalized details with enough confidence that they details can be filled in by lower level engineers.
Yes. Perhaps I’m getting old and cynical, but “staff engineer” is an invention by companies that are no longer growing quickly enough to absorb all of their most promising employees into proper management roles. Instead of having the power of enabling continued employment, you have to “influence” others to do your work.
A promising engineer rises through the technical track by showing impact. You show impact by getting others to sign on to your vision. You request a budget. You engage with a lot of stakeholders through meetings. Sounds a lot like what we call a "people manager" but without all of the tools available to one.
Maybe a better way of framing it is people managers have too much power. In an alternate reality, "staff engineers" hire and fire and have budget signature powers, and "people managers" are more like HR-plus who manage interpersonal conflicts and deliver performance evaluations. The status quo is a remnant of how society has historically undervalued and infantilized technical workers.
Yes and no. There is a part where you're responsible for the direction of the team but the real trick is knowing when to step away and let the teams executing own it and discuss with management what metrics are needed to track success.
There is also another part where you are free to work on activities that are 12-24 months out. So, prototyping new ideas, setting up the pilots and mentoring sr. s/w engg. resources to be able to execute on them.
The little secret no one mentions is that most of the time you're not needed. If you are then you're too much in the weeds and cannot be an effective staff engineer.
>> The little secret no one mentions is that most of the time you're not needed.
That should be true of every individual.
If you mean role (i.e., "what if we had no staff engineers (or equivalents) at all?"), ye-es, but only for a time, else the company will likely be, at best, inefficient.
Every higher level role on the team, be it a staff eng, a tech lead, an EM, etc, is a multiplier role; they should behave as basically a glorified plate spinner. When the plates are all spinning they can step away and you'll never notice their absence. When the plates are wobbly, you should feel their presence more. The ideal workflow is a series of barely perceptible touches to add a little more inertia across a variety of plates.
Based on how time is being spent that sounds an awful lot like an EM role to me?
Like EM responsibilities minus actual humans reporting to you?