Why I’d Choose a High-Paying Senior Role Over a Low-Paying Staff Role
What I Learned After Seeing Dozens of Title-Inflated Engineers
Every few months, someone messages me on LinkedIn saying:
I’m aiming to be a Staff this year
Not because their scope changed
Not because they unlocked a new impact
Just because the title sounds fancy
Here’s the uncomfortable truth we don’t like to admit:
Titles are just random strings made to satisfy your ego
If you gave me a choice between:
• A high-paying Senior
vs.
• A low-paying Staff
I’d pick the Senior role every single time
Because the market doesn’t reward the title on your badge
It rewards the value you actually create
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Coming back to the topic, let me explain
The Title Illusion
I’ve been in enough teams across different companies to see how disconnected titles can be from real impact
I’ve seen:
• “Staff Engineers” doing pure Senior-level work
• “Senior Engineers” are compensated like Principals because they consistently deliver
• Organizations where title hierarchy means nothing but influence means everything
Once you see this enough times, you realize:
→ Your title doesn’t define your level
→ The problems you solve and the trust you build do
→ And the market ultimately decides your worth, not your company’s leveling chart
Titles make you feel good.
Compensation pays your bills and determines if the market agrees to your level
Why Chasing Titles Backfires
Chasing a title too early often leads to one of these traps:
1. You earn the responsibility without earning the money
You get the title, but the scope and compensation doesn’t change much
So you’re now a Staff on paper but not in skill, not in leverage, not in compensation.
That mismatch will haunt you during future job switches
2. Some companies inflate titles to deflate salaries
Some companies hand out flashy titles to mask mediocre pay. For example, a Staff Engineer at IBM makes less money than an SDE2 at Amazon
You feel accomplished until you compare offers and realize you’ve been underpriced for years
3. You stretch into Staff expectations without Staff readiness
Trying to stretch yourself into Staff-level expectations without building depth first leads to burnout, shallow architecture decisions, and erosion of trust.
Staff engineers aren’t created by titles.
They’re created by responsibility, repetition, and reputation.
What the Market Actually Rewards
The market doesn’t care about your level
It cares about your leverage
Leverage comes from doing work that isn’t easily replaceable
If you want to get paid like a Staff member without needing the title, focus on three things:
1. Own critical systems
Every high-impact engineer eventually becomes “the person who owns X”
Not because someone assigned it to them.
But because they stepped into the fire, solved problems nobody else touched, and built systems that mattered
Ask yourself:
What breaks that the team is terrified of?
What system keeps getting duct-taped instead of fixed?
What operational nightmare everyone complains about but no one volunteers to improve?
Pick one
Go deep
Own it end-to-end
Ownership is the foundation of Staff-level trust
2. Build leverage through influence
A Senior engineer solves problems.
A Staff engineer makes sure the whole team solves problems better.
Influence doesn’t come from speaking louder.
It comes from:
Writing clear RFCs
Mentoring juniors until they can lead features
Spotting design flaws before they become outages
Unblocking the team without creating dependencies
Being the calm, steady person during chaos
Influence is invisible but powerful.
It compounds
3. Become the person people go to when things break
You know the engineer everyone slacks first during an incident?
Not because they’re the on-call.
But because people trust them to fix things fast.
That’s a Staff-level signal.
You become that engineer by:
Understanding system behavior under stress
Learning tradeoffs, not just tools
Practicing incident reviews the right way
Reducing blast radius instead of patching symptoms
When you’re the one people trust during failure, your level stops mattering.
Your impact becomes obvious.
The Mental Shift That Changes Everything
At some point in your career, you have to stop optimizing for what looks impressive externally and start optimizing for what increases your value internally and in the market.
Staff titles don’t make you Staff
Staff skills make you Staff
And once you build those skills, the titles and compensation catch up automatically inside your current company or the next one.
The ladder becomes a formality
Final Thoughts
Titles look great online.
But your career isn’t built on your headline.
It’s built on the systems you own, the people you elevate, the trust you accumulate, and the leverage you build over years of compounding impact.
So here’s the rule I wish more engineers lived by:
Never become a low-paid Staff
Don’t chase the badge
Chase the scope that forces the market to pay you what you’re worth
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