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My thoughts about the Principal role

galiglobal.com

31–40 of 124 posts

Re: My thoughts about the Principal role

#31
post #27

I have personally not found the staff/principal level very enjoyable or satisfying. You end up being a hub for the larger team, helping everyone do their jobs. I'm not just referring to the coders. It's very draining and I resent that the industry classifies this type of work as technical IC work. A small subset of these higher "IC" roles do get to focus on technical IC work, but for most people a staff/principal rol…

I am in a PE role right now and I 100% agree that the PE is the hub. I like that. I see my role as being a catalyst. I make things move along faster and more efficiently. I like seeing growth in others on the team.

Also, it’s ok if you don’t like that. If you would rather just be in there getting your hands dirty solving that one hard problem with no interruptions, then I think you should do that. You’ll be happier. Probably the increase in happiness is worth it even if you have to “pay” for it with a slightly reduced salary.

Re: My thoughts about the Principal role

#32
post #9

Principal role = expensive lean manager. They want to help others achieve something without actually getting their hands dirty. Of all the principal engineers I’ve worked with, the vast majority behave like motivational coaches/lean managers. Examples: - There’s an outage on a Sunday morning. A huge Slack thread starts. Devops and devs on call manage to fix the issue. Principal engineer gets involved ACKing other’s p…

I'm in a PE role, and I have to tell myself every day not to go do the POC because that's not how I can maximize my impact. If someone else can do that work, I'm going to try and lean on them. Strategy is hard. Much harder than I thought it would be. I am unable to make progress on strategy when I'm deep in tactical work. I do jump in when needed, but every time I get my hands dirty I fall behind on strategy. Your PE…

This is a fine line for me as a PE. It is good to help the team grow. However, I like to do the PoC sometimes so that I can keep my skills sharp and my opinions grounded in reality.

If I just sit in my ivory tower dishing out advice, the advice will eventually become useless.

Re: My thoughts about the Principal role

#33
post #27

I have personally not found the staff/principal level very enjoyable or satisfying. You end up being a hub for the larger team, helping everyone do their jobs. I'm not just referring to the coders. It's very draining and I resent that the industry classifies this type of work as technical IC work. A small subset of these higher "IC" roles do get to focus on technical IC work, but for most people a staff/principal rol…

You definitely need to be with a team that knows how to use principal-level ICs to be effective. Most teams need to be trained/coached (by the principal) in how to do that. :)

Re: My thoughts about the Principal role

#34
One thing we have made good experiences with recently is, having two separate meetings for managing engineering initiatives:

1. Engineering Meeting - led by Principal Engineer. With pure focus on technical questions. We go through open issues, PRs and discuss technical questions, engineering decisions like API design. Stakeholders from other teams are invited to participate.

2. Planning Meeting - led by a Engineering Manager. Report on progress, discuss priorization and decide work assignment a.k.a. "sprint planning". The principal engineer can take part in this as a team member.

This helps me (as a principal) to stay away from people- and project management and purely focus on engineering topics (inc. writing code), which is where I see as my core competence.

Re: My thoughts about the Principal role

#35
post #9

Principal role = expensive lean manager. They want to help others achieve something without actually getting their hands dirty. Of all the principal engineers I’ve worked with, the vast majority behave like motivational coaches/lean managers. Examples: - There’s an outage on a Sunday morning. A huge Slack thread starts. Devops and devs on call manage to fix the issue. Principal engineer gets involved ACKing other’s p…

I'm in a PE role, and I have to tell myself every day not to go do the POC because that's not how I can maximize my impact. If someone else can do that work, I'm going to try and lean on them. Strategy is hard. Much harder than I thought it would be. I am unable to make progress on strategy when I'm deep in tactical work. I do jump in when needed, but every time I get my hands dirty I fall behind on strategy. Your PE…

+1. And if there are several ways to design or implement something, it is 1000x better to do the one proposed by the people who will do the work. They’ll understand it better, have more context, and be much more motivated.

Unfortunately this has the side effect of making the principal look like an overpaid rubber stamp and cheerleader to the best less-senior ICs who usually have their shit together. :)

Re: My thoughts about the Principal role

#36
post #27

I have personally not found the staff/principal level very enjoyable or satisfying. You end up being a hub for the larger team, helping everyone do their jobs. I'm not just referring to the coders. It's very draining and I resent that the industry classifies this type of work as technical IC work. A small subset of these higher "IC" roles do get to focus on technical IC work, but for most people a staff/principal rol…

I quit my job as a PE in AWS, and now work on writing performance-critical code in a scientific context. I couldn’t be happier with the decision.

If you’re considering getting out, I would encourage it. Getting back to working on primarily technical problems, rather than social/communication scaling ones, has been great for my overall happiness.

Re: My thoughts about the Principal role

#38
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s an outage on a Sunday morning. A huge Slack thread starts. Devops and devs on call manage to fix the issue. Principal engineer gets involved ACKing other’s people comments, adding thumbs up emojis, and at the end says “Big thank you to all the people involved” (plus a rocket emoji) Just want to call out how accurate this is. The last place I worked was full of this kind of person (as managers, wecdid not ha…

Not a "Principal", but you guys would rather be followed up by a business person who would come up with their revised requirements and timelines, each day or the other? Or obey the commands of the technological genius that somehow always have the answer to every question, for others to implement exactly as told? Leading by using technological experience and refraining from prescribing "the meds" all the time, is ligh…

[deleted]

Re: My thoughts about the Principal role

#39
Some of this advice is great, like getting out of the way, guiding people with how to think about trade-offs and doing daily coding. But it doesn't feel like 'Principal' level advice, at least in terms of Big Tech and the blog notes the author isn't sure what the distinction is with Staff.

The author complains that it's hard to be in the critical path at a senior level. This lacks self-awareness. It's always hard to be in the critical path. Shipping on time is one of the toughest deliverables of the software engineer role, and one that many people struggle with. Accurately estimating development costs including wall time vs. actual time someone has to work on a project is a very important skill. It's not acceptable for senior engineers to abrogate responsibility for this, especially if they claim to be mentoring other engineers.

Senior engineers own the business outcome and must weigh costs of all kinds, from security risks to technical debt. As scope increases, the feedback loops get longer and longer. A new engineer can tell if they did well with a comprehensive unit test. A junior engineer can tell if they did well with a performance or integration test. A senior engineer can tell if they did well with an A-B test in the market. A staff engineer can tell if they did well by seeing market share grow.

In Big Tech, senior staff and principal roles carry the idea of doing something to 'shock the world' - that is, successfully shipping innovation that people were afraid to, for example, because it seemed risky. Greasing the wheels of communication between teams and helping people avoid common mistakes is fine and a good thing. But there is limited business value in building consensus around the latest "architecture" or framework or language or whatever, however nice it feels to enjoy the social status as the person turned to for this kind of question. Step change innovation is the real value add and this article hardly touches on it.

Re: My thoughts about the Principal role

#40
post #9

Principal role = expensive lean manager. They want to help others achieve something without actually getting their hands dirty. Of all the principal engineers I’ve worked with, the vast majority behave like motivational coaches/lean managers. Examples: - There’s an outage on a Sunday morning. A huge Slack thread starts. Devops and devs on call manage to fix the issue. Principal engineer gets involved ACKing other’s p…

The PE should also be doing a lot of behind the scenes (from senior dev pov) strategy work with leadership team w.r.t identifying long term technical risks and ensuring right investments happen, grooming tech talent bench through perf/promo processes, seeding/sponsoring new tech initiatives etc.

All this is informed by the observations and insights that come from the "support" work they do in those outage huddles or design discussion meetings.

The technical thought leadership work they do with the business/product leadership team is where they really earn their paycheck.

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