The Staff Engineer's Path

When you join a new company, most of the big picture is completely unknown to you. A big part of starting a new job is building context, learning how your new organization works, and uncovering everyone’s goals. Think of it like the fog of war in a video game, where you can’t see what awaits you in the parts of the map you haven’t explored yet. As you scout around, you clear the fog and get a better picture of the terrain, learning what’s surrounding you and whether there are wolves coming to bother your villagers. You can set out to uncover the obscured parts in all three of the maps and find ways to make that information easy for other people to understand. For instance: Your locator map can help you make sure the teams you work with really understand their purpose in the organization, who their customers are, and how their work affects other people. Your topographical map can help highlight the friction and gaps between teams and open up the paths of communication. Your treasure map can help you make sure everyone knows exactly what they’re trying to achieve and why. You’ll be able to clear some parts of the map through everyday learning, but you’ll need to deliberately set out to clear other parts. A core theme of this chapter is how important it is to know things: to have continual context and a sense of what’s going on. Knowing things takes both skill and opportunity, and you might need to work at it for a while before you start seeing what you’re not seeing.