How New Staff Engineers Build Judgment Without Years of Experience

About this episode

How do new staff engineers build judgment without the years of experience that used to come with the role? Mallika Rao, engineering leader in big tech, explains why the data-structures-and-algorithms foundation everyone was trained on is no longer enough on its own, and where the complexity has actually shifted now that AI writes the implementation. In this video, we cover: • Why "how does AI affect engineers" is the wrong question, and what to ask instead • Rehearsing multiple futures: what judgment looks like in a staff engineer • The case method: building judgment from incident reports and system design history instead of waiting years for it • Cognitive coordination, code review load, and the surprise ask for more meetings at staff level • Tiger teams vs scaled teams, trust as architecture, and building evals from a spreadsheet • Splitting planning from execution so engineers stop falling behind with agents • Taste vs judgment, and how to build both outside of software If you've just made staff, or you're about to, this conversation gives you a frame for what the level actually demands now and how to grow into it faster than the old apprenticeship allowed. Recorded at the AI