A junior dev outshipped our staff engineer this quarter

not naming names. small team you'd figure it out. our junior - 14 months experience total - shipped more user-visible features in q3 than our staff engineer. by a lot. like 3x. i was ready to write this off as "well the staff engineer is doing platform work, that's different". then i actually looked. the staff engineer spent most of the quarter in design docs, RFC threads, and meetings about meetings. the junior just opened cursor and shipped. yes the code needed review. yes there were bugs. but the features landed and customers used them. i'm not saying staff engineers are useless. i AM saying the rubric we use to measure them is from 2018 and it rewards process over outcomes. and the kids with the new tools are gonna eat their lunch if we don't fix that.