Comment by __turbobrew__

Yea it is dependent on your company.

When I think of highly functioning staff engineers Im thinking of people like Jeff Dean and Mitchell Hashimoto. Similarly at companies I have been at, even the highest level principal super staff++ engineers still code. They do the high level strategy and design, but they are still writing PRs at least every week or two. If you are spending 100% of your time on politics and architecture as a staff eng I think that shows a somewhat dysfunctional organization.