Would you rather have your organization be filled with engineers that output high quality work or so-called Staff Engineer influencers?
Personally I would rather most to be the former. Doers are important (probably the most important) and should be rewarded, IMO. Hard work and no promotion leads to quitting.
Getting promoted to Staff etc is more about being put on important projects, building relationships with managers from other teams (i.e. reminding them you exist come Promo committee), and tooting your own horn a lot. IMO, this is not necessarily related to how good you are and perhaps not as valuable to the organization as much as we think.
Personally, I've gotten promoted (or recently, not laid off) basically because my team was selected to work on the fancy new project. Probably some other guy in a different team didn't get a promotion because he was just on the wrong project.
Organizations that are filled purely with "doers" who don't make their coworkers better provide a great perpetual need for people to come in and clean up the mess later at often higher pay. :p
But maybe there's more than just "sloppy isolated doers" and "no-code-writing influencer staff timewasters"...
A doer who does help everyone around them keep the codebase clean too... well... yep, that's the influencer part. So yeah, definitely want that.
In my experience, there are few of those type of valuable influencers around and they have a limited career path. Maybe a promotion or two above standard engineer, but that is it.
Those that rise higher to the very senior positions are are able to promote their image, regardless of how much value that actually provide, and in fact they often provide negative value. That is in IT structures. Our primary mechanism for promotion at Big Corp is "influence". But influence is measured in a completely stupid manner by people who have been promoted to senior positions via the same completely stupid process.
People who come up with a "risk reduction" methodology and manage to sell it to someone senior, that requires all engineers to start adhering to this new methodology, which provides very little risk reduction but negatively impacts a huge amount of productivity, is very likely to get promoted.
For example, one person may have inadvertently done something stupid on a production host such as running CPU intensive operations on huge log files. So instead of looking at the correct fix, which would be to immediately form a small, very capable team of engineers tasked with going across the firm and helping teams get log files streamed off correctly, so engineers have very little need to go onto prod hosts, nope, some person with "influence", will decide with no consultation and no notice that all engineer access to prod hosts is gone. So now to support our applications we have to ask a support team to transfer large files around our network in an ad-hoc manner just so we can perform the analysis we need. Not only is this not much risk reduction, it completely hinders engineers ability to do a good job, which negatively impacts the company.
Yet this person if he isn't already senior, will be able to in the yearly review hugely sell his "risk reduction" exercise and will almost certainly be seen by the other idiots as someone equally capable as themselves and worthy of a similar position.
Great comment, I find that many influencer types aren't actually capable of doing the jobs of their juniors and reasoning about low level systems. Promotion systems don't differentiate between having influence and having good influence. Also, sometimes the hard problems that have the most impact and real org wide influence aren't at the visible influencer level, but instead related to low level "grunt work" problems. A lot of the principal engineer and sr engineering manager types aren't actually worth their salt and can't solve hard problems, instead relying on others to do the work and then participating in high level meetings so they can take the credit.
Personally I would rather most to be the former. Doers are important (probably the most important) and should be rewarded, IMO. Hard work and no promotion leads to quitting.
Getting promoted to Staff etc is more about being put on important projects, building relationships with managers from other teams (i.e. reminding them you exist come Promo committee), and tooting your own horn a lot. IMO, this is not necessarily related to how good you are and perhaps not as valuable to the organization as much as we think.
Personally, I've gotten promoted (or recently, not laid off) basically because my team was selected to work on the fancy new project. Probably some other guy in a different team didn't get a promotion because he was just on the wrong project.