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Staff Engineers Are Quietly Becoming the New Overhead
Nobody’s getting laid off. Roles are just quietly disappearing from budget spreadsheets. I watched it start.
I sat in a meeting two weeks ago where our VP of Engineering said something that stuck with me. We were discussing headcount planning for Q3 and someone brought up the cost per engineer across levels.
The VP pulled up a spreadsheet. He didn’t say anything dramatic. He just pointed at the staff engineer column and said “that’s where we need to have a hard conversation.”
Nobody responded. The staff engineers weren’t in the room. But everyone knew what he meant.
I’ve been thinking about that moment ever since. Not because it was surprising. Because it wasn’t. And that’s what made it unsettling.
The math that nobody wants to say out loud
I’m going to share some numbers. They’re not from some industry report. They’re from my own company and from conversations I’ve had with friends at four or five other places over the past couple months.
A staff engineer at our company costs roughly 2.4x what a mid-level engineer costs. Total comp, benefits, all in.
