The Last StaffPlus NYC: When the Role Outgrew Its Room
A Director walked up to our group in the hallway, our white StaffPlus lanyards clearly visible, and said something I'm still thinking about: "I came over because StaffPlus people have more interesting conversations than the LeadDev attendees."
It was a compliment, but also a diagnosis. It highlighted something the organizers had noticed: After four years, the overlap between Staff+ IC conversations and engineering leadership conversations has grown so much that running parallel conferences was a challenge. This was the last StaffPlus NYC. Next year the organizers replace it with LDX3, a three-track conference where the lines between IC and manager tracks blur deliberately.
Four years ago, Staff+ engineers needed their own space because so few people understood the role. Now the role has matured enough that the rest of leadership is catching up. Here's what stuck with me from the final StaffPlus NYC.
Understanding Staff+ superpowers
The conference chairs found the perfect talk to kick things off. Katie Sylor-Miller's talk was full of actionable blink-and-you'll-miss-it advice for growing into the Staff+ role. It's not just about deeper technical work. It's about recognizing that managers are your peers and your job is to help them help their team. Politics isn't a dirty word, it's a part of the job at the staff level. Her advice on the value of weekly emails over brag documents resonated too. I've learned that lesson from experience.
Kelly Moran's talk on what your VP is thinking explored their incentives and constraints and revealed the superpowers that Staff+ engineers have access to but aren't available to a VP. VPs have authority, they can shift headcount, remake teams, redirect entire roadmaps, but that power is blunt and disruptive. They don't have time to go deep on any one area because so much is competing for their attention. They're also responding to external forces: executives above them, market pressures, other divisions. Sometimes they miss internal feedback from within the division they control.
That's where Staff+ engineers come in. Our influence is more diffuse but can be precisely targeted. We have the ability to go deep, to listen to the internal voices, and to package that information in a way that's accessible to a VP. Kelly pointed out that one person can't know everything in a large organization and that is why different roles exist. If you watch just one talk from this year's Staff+ you should watch this one.
These talks named something important: Staff+ engineers occupy a unique position in the org. We're not managers, we're not VPs, but we're also not just senior ICs. We have different leverage points. We can go deep on technical problems, build trust across teams without the baggage of reporting structure or headcount, and say things VPs can't say. Understanding what makes the role distinct matters as much as technical skill.
Understanding when change is possible
But having these superpowers doesn't mean using them constantly. Leaf Roy's talk had a poetic observation that even with greater power and influence, some problems simply aren't solvable within the current org structure and that's ok.
I thought it paired nicely with Carla Geisser's talk on the magic of a crisis. Carla's insight was that nothing really big changes unless there is a crisis. However, not every crisis is useful for driving change. She gave five properties that make a crisis actionable:
- Fundamental Surprise - everyone has to simultaneously deal with the new reality
- Broken Core Functions - change is no longer optional
- High Visibility - being seen as blocking progress is uncomfortable for those in the spotlight
- Perception Breakdown - different parts of the org have received different facts, creating a chance to build a new shared picture of the world
- Rigid timing - forces decisions
The key insight: you need 3 out of 5 for a useful crisis. Something with some of these properties might not be business ending, but it is an opportunity to radically alter priorities and disrupt communication patterns.
Todd Outten's closing talk brought this home by emphasizing how important it is to understand the business and its needs at the distinguished engineer level. Who are the key customers? What drives revenue growth? What drives excessive cost? It's important to have a view of why your group exists and how the company views your contribution. This business context is what tells you what changes are possible, not just theoretically desirable.
Question conventional wisdom with nuance
Knowing when change is possible also means knowing when the conventional wisdom applies and when it doesn't.
Travis Thieman's talk on Big Bang rewrites was unexpectedly good. I'm solidly in the "never rewrite" camp and figured I was ready to counter Travis's challenge. I loved his framing of the history of the common "never do a big bang rewrite" advice, tracing the knowledge back to Joel Spolsky's experience with Netscape Navigator, Martin Fowler's work on web monoliths and of course Fred Brooks' work on the IBM System/360. He observed that the common advice was given in the context of these large software projects and reminded us that we all have permission to perform rewrites for smaller more tractable systems. So yeah, I approached this talk expecting disagreement but it's hard to disagree with someone who points out RFC 2119 is in fact the #1 banger of 1997.
Hazel Weakly's talk on the art of strategy took a similar approach to challenging conventional thinking. I was expecting a review of Richard Rumelt's ideas from Good Strategy / Bad Strategy but Hazel took the concept in a very different direction. Focusing on Optionality + Confluence as the key leverage goals for an engineering strategy. Hazel observed that Optionality is secretly graceful extensibility. I liked the observation that strategy is 99% narrative but 99% not YOUR narrative.
Both talks were doing the same thing: taking widely-accepted advice and asking "but when does this actually apply?" That's a very Staff+ way of thinking. You've been around long enough to know the rules, and experienced enough to know when to break them.
Long-term thinking in a short-term world
This kind of nuanced judgment, knowing when the rules apply, extends to how Staff+ engineers think about time horizons too.
I loved Lauren Budorick's talk on building Figma Draw because it showed how to execute on a long term multi-year project, especially when the project is just a side project for the first couple of years. It's a masterclass in keeping a vision alive when it's not the org's priority, then knowing when the moment has arrived to push it across the finish line.
The Squarespace team's talk on reimagining their image pipeline told a similar story about evolution. Why change was needed, how the architecture adapted for scale and flexibility. This wasn't about a crisis forcing change or a big bang rewrite. This was about recognizing when foundations need to shift and actually doing the patient work to evolve them before they break.
Staff+ engineers operate on different timescales. You're not just thinking about this quarter's roadmap. You're thinking about what enables the next three years of work. What technical foundations will let the team move faster later, even if they slow us down now? What side project needs to be kept alive because it'll matter in two years? That long-term thinking is hard to maintain in organizations optimized for quarterly results, but it's essential.
After the conference, Krys Flores observed that a major theme this year was mentoring. Many of the speakers mentioned how important mentoring was for their growth, the growth of the teams they worked with and the growth of colleagues. Alex Poulos encouraged us to invest deeply in 2-3 engineers. This was an interesting callout because recently I've been spreading myself across a much broader range of engineers but as a result don't have as much time for each one.
On the train home, I tried to follow Alex's advice. I opened my notes app to list 2-3 engineers I should invest more deeply in. I gave up when my list hit 10+. Not because I'm bad at prioritization, but because I genuinely see potential everywhere in my area of influence. I'm wondering if that's not a mentorship problem but a systems design problem. Maybe I could try running small cohort where strong ICs pair with emerging ones to solve real problems together? Something to explore when I get back to the office. 🤔
Multiple speakers also mentioned offering bookable office hours as a way to be accessible to other engineers. That idea seems worth trying.
At the closing Tanya and Maude revealed that this year was the last StaffPlus NYC. There are now many more resources for Staff+ engineers today than existed when the conference first started. It was also pretty clear from the hallway track that there was quite a bit of overlap in interest between the talks at both LeadDev's more manager focused talks and Staff+'s IC talks. I myself, can't wait for the recording of Anil Dash's talk on power dynamics. I tried to sneak into the LeadDev room for that one but was turned away because of its popularity.
Instead LeadDev is going to run their LDX3 concept next year in NY, instead of the parallel two single-track conferences with a shared hallway track.
This makes sense. Both Managers and Staff+ are working with a definition of the system that is broader because they are modeling a more dynamic system that includes humans.
However, I'm going to miss the touch of whimsy that existed at the StaffPlus conference. I chuckled at some of the apologies by Akshay Shah and Kelly Moran about how they were former Staff+ engineers so it was ok they were let into the room despite currently holding people manager titles. I loved watching the community do what Staff+ engineers do best: sense-making. Attendees swapped tips about Rands' leadership slack, shared their favorite chapters of Tanya's book, and collectively bristled when Tanya revealed LeadDev had stolen one of OUR talks for their track. The possessiveness was both funny and touching but we didn't know yet that this was our space... for the last time.
Alas, time marches on. StaffPlus joins OpenVisConf, Deconstruct, and StrangeLoop in the pantheon of conferences that ended while they were still great. At least we have the videos and memories... and the knowledge that more will join them.