Your CTO sits in the roadmap meeting at 10am, reviews microservice architecture at 4pm, and answers system questions in Slack at 11pm. Three moments in one day, and all of them are Staff Engineer work piling up while the CTO work waits in the inbox.
He is filling a real hole in the organization. The cost shows up in what nobody does: the 24-month technical strategy has no owner while he closes pull requests.
The CTO's work
Strong CTOs spend most of their time on four fronts:
- Connecting business strategy to technical strategy
- Building the engineering organization: hiring, structure, culture
- Representing engineering in the boardroom and in product decisions
- Keeping technical relationships with investors, partners, and customers
Melvin Conway published the link in 1968 between how an organization is structured and the design of the systems it produces. A CTO buried in implementation leaves that link with nobody steering it.
The Staff Engineer's work
The Staff Engineer works inside engineering, at depth:
- Long-term vision for architecture and systems
- Standards and guides that several teams follow
- Leadership of high-impact technical projects
- Mentoring senior engineers and running design reviews
Will Larson describes the role and its archetypes in Staff Engineer (O'Reilly, 2021). Camille Fournier draws the line between this work and management in The Manager's Path (O'Reilly, 2017).
Two paths mix the roles
The company grew and nobody took the role. The founding CTO was the original Staff Engineer. The organization passed 20 people, the title changed scope, and the deep technical work lost its owner. He absorbs it because nobody else remains.
The CTO prefers technical work. Many reach the job from the technical track. Hiring, team design, and board negotiation pay off slower than an architecture problem, and the CTO picks the problem he knows.
Both paths shrink the strategy and hand Staff Engineering work to the person with the highest opportunity cost in the company.
What lands on nobody
- Nobody looks 24 months out at the architecture
- Each squad sets its own standards
- Business decisions with technical impact proceed without engineering input
- The CTO's day turns into a help desk and incident prevention waits
Staff Engineering work still gets done, by someone without the time, focus, or mandate to do it well.
Separating the two roles
Separation happens on paper, with scope and responsibility written down.
The CTO writes where the technical organization needs to go. The Staff Engineer writes how to get there and tracks the teams on the way. Both keep the same priority list and sit in the same architecture reviews.
A company under 15 people can carry both roles, as long as the CTO knows he carries them. Past 15 to 20 engineers, the overlap starts costing hours of strategy every week.
An on-demand Staff Engineer
A company without an internal Staff Engineer hires a consultant for a closed scope: architecture for a new product, technical uplift for a team, diagnosis of a legacy system. The consultant arrives with a deadline and a deliverable, and the CTO returns to the work only he can do.
