The Staff Engineer’s Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change is written by Tanya Reilly and published on October 25, 2022, by O’Reilly Media. Favorite Quotes Early in your career, if you do a great job on something that turns out to be unnecessary, you’ve still done a great job. At the staff engineer level, everything you do has a high opportunity cost, so your work needs to be important.