Companies extending their individual contributor career tracks is a fairly new development in our field and when people ask “what does that title mean?” the answer has always been “well it depends”. And it does. In this opening talk we will talk about all the things this role can be, the things it is definitely not. We will talk about how to navigate its many facets, how to know if you are being effective and look ahead to the day of amazing talks on how to be successful.

Choosing the most important work got trickier the more senior I became. Not only did I have more freedom to choose my own work, I had access to more critical projects, from more parts of the company, and faster-changing priorities.

This talk introduces weekly rituals I've used to ensure I'm focused on the most important work available. These tools help me combat anti-patterns like:

• Prioritization by Inertia (when does it make sense to abandon this project?)
• Prioritization by Decibels (is this project important or just championed by a... vocal stakeholder) 
• Prioritization by Guilt (I *said* I would do this, but now there's more important work)

Armed with these strategies I'm able to consistently execute on the most important and critical projects. I can maximize my impact without burning out or stressing about what's not getting done.

You've spent the last couple of years building your skills as a Staff Engineer in one place: you know the codebase, you know what’s expected of you, and you know who to talk to in order to influence technical direction.

Now it's time to move on. How do you effectively start off a new job at Staff-level?

We’ll start by talking about building trust and clear expectations with your manager and management chain. You were hired externally for a reason - what is that? Of the many, many different meanings of “Staff+ engineer”, which is your manager’s expectation?

We'll talk about strategies for coming up to speed technically and building networks with other ICs. We'll discuss acclimating to a new environment: how to apply your expertise without over-indexing on the challenges of your past role and company.

You’ll leave this session with:

• Frameworks for defining success in those first few months. 
• The tools to have productive conversations with your management chain about what your role will be. 
• Tactics for maximizing your unique value as a new employee.
• Excitement and confidence in approaching your next role!

Tackling complex, long-term, cross-org projects can feel like you are planning a mission to Mars - how do you ensure success when the end goal feels like it's millions of miles away? 

In this session, Katie will recount how she successfully led the planning and execution of a Mars-sized foundational rewrite to enable Progressive Web App (PWA) technology on Etsy.com - by taking a page from NASA's book, and first stopping at the Moon. She'll share what she learned about how to collaborate across teams and orgs, how to structure a project so you can measure success and set expectations at every step on the journey, and how to function as a "Consulting Architect" throughout every phase of execution and level up your team in the process.

This talk focus on the challenge of making changes as a IC lead in larger organizations where the glue work necessary to convince sometimes many different stakeholders can be a stumbling block to those trying to develop their skills and careers. Often times we see that even having the right technology or best solution falls short of our goals because getting commitment is a challenging and often chaotic process in many institutions.

This talk tackles five areas where you can build metaphorical muscles to help increase the likelihood that your initiatives are successful.

As an SRE, capacity management, including demand forecasting, is a challenging routine when managing one of the world's largest Aurora/Mesos compute clusters. While Twitter Engineering moves forward with re-platforming to Kubernetes. Come hear me speak about implementing a technical solution that increased our existing clusters capacity by 9%—resulting in a multi-year saving of 9-figures in CAPEX by solving inefficiency challenges at datacenter scale.

• Discovering underutilized resources (CPU, Mem, and Network) within our storage platforms
• Implementing a modern solution based on past experience with:
• Solaris Zones
• Cgroups
• Namespaces
• Co-locate compute and storage workload on the same bare-metal machine

Influencing decisions at a Fortune 50 company is challenging for anyone, but it's even more challenging when the people you need to influence to support those decisions don't report to you.  Building and maintaining trust in order to be an influencer is one of the key roles of an individual contributor.  In this session, Leslie will talk about the ways she has built trust and gained influence over her 20+ year career in technology.

What do Geocities webpages and green screen monochrome monitors have in common? Other than being ancient relics of technologies past, we can actually learn a lot from them when it comes to Accessibility. As organizations lean into creating more inclusive web experiences, we’re seeing more emphasis being placed on techniques that can now be considered retro.

Let’s climb into our Wayback Machines and delve into some foundational approaches and processes to facilitate and test for Accessibility compliance on the web.

When you're a Senior SWE or below, you can often get away with waiting until a clear goal presents itself. You'll own details, but it's on others to present the big plan to work within.

However as a StaffEng, turning a vague project definition into a crisp plan is very much on you.

This talk distills down my own approaches (those that have worked and some that haven't) into a short set of advice. We'll discuss how to drive technical, organizational, and business clarity with techniques including:

• Defining domain clarity by framing system purpose and responsibilities
• "Identifying the highest order bit" - what question can we answer to drive the most increased clarity? 
• Use mediocre solutions to spur discussion and discover even better ones 
• Avoiding surprising the leaders around you by radiating intent and making decisions in public

Viewers will walk away with tools for discussing and framing unclear objectives, awareness of common failure modes, and (most importantly) techniques for turning murky projects into obvious, publicly agreed upon plans of action.

Making large, important technical decisions is a critical aspect of a senior individual contributor's role. With the wide impact these decisions can have, it is essential to make the correct decision. Even more vital is ensuring the decision is made and communicated in a way that the team members impacted by it trust and buy in to the decision. Otherwise, even the best decisions will never realize their full potential when executed.

This case study examines how Comcast has employed the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a decision-making framework developed in the 1970s, and adapted it for making technical and non-technical decisions both large and small. We will cover the key aspects that have made it successful for engineering teams, what we learned from our early mistakes, signs that the decision-making process you use is working effectively, and how you can easily leverage the AHP for your decisions.

When I was young, I knew I wanted to have a job where I was able to write software for a living. In retrospect, I was thinking too shallow. Today, I'm a professional bridge builder. I don't build bridges over water, but instead, constantly create structures that build paths over obstacles. In my session, I want to share how I came to find out that I was a bridge builder and how that carried through my journey as a senior engineer to where I sit today as a VP-level engineer in a public company.

Your peers are often your best resource for learning and growth. Are you getting the most out of your peers?

We have a growing and productive staff plus peer group at MongoDB. In this talk, I’ll share what we intended to do with the group, what we have done with the group, and what has worked well or has been particularly valuable to us. I will also compare our group to staff plus peer groups at other companies, in order to identify what works, why it works, and what can be done to improve staff plus peer groups.

Join us: Learn from your peers and to help your peers learn (about peer groups)!

Leaders rely on their influencing skills to get things done. Increase your impact on your team and organisation by strengthening your influencing skills. While you might have the best answer or insight to a problem, it won’t matter if you can’t influence people to listen to you. This workshop will show you how.

This course will help you understand where influence comes from and practical things you can do to increase your influence regardless of your role, through a combination of discussion, theory and practical exercises.

What will you learn?

• Why influence matters more for those on the IC track
• Where influence comes from
• How to understand your scope of influence
• Common traps that limit one’s ability to influence
• How to increase your chances of getting buy-in and enacting change
• Tools to expand your influencing toolkit with practical experience

This workshop is aimed at people further along the IC track such as the Senior Software Engineer, Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer but will also benefit those in management roles such as Engineering Managers or Team Leads. If you want to increase your influence, then this workshop is for you!