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My thoughts about the Principal role

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Re: My thoughts about the Principal role

#91

Post by zebnyc »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #53
vp8989 wrote: 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 end up being a hub for the larger team, helping everyone do their jobs. This is 70% of my job as a Sr Staff Engineer and I love it. But yes, it does take a certain temperament to enjoy it or find it satisfying. I like collaboration and pairing and helping other ICs grow their careers. And I love teaching, which this role allows me to do in abundance in all sorts of ways. Sure, I enjoy sustained technical work a…

How would you recommend that an engineer network with principal/staff engineers like yourself in their respective companies? Asking as you mention that the role is about enabling / empowering others.

Context: I am going to be starting a new job as a senior software engineer in a mid-size company in a few weeks.

Thanks

Re: My thoughts about the Principal role

#92

Post by spenczar5 »

wikibob wrote: post #83
spenczar5 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saved most of what I made from the Amazon comp, and now have more than enough to feel comfortable. Now, I get $110,000 per year. That's plenty. I have a family, but my wife works too in tech and has a good income. The marginal value of the extra income from working in big tech just wasn't worth it for me.

Thanks for the reply! If you had it to do over again, would you chose to go into the area that you’re especially interested in and sacrifice ever getting the high FAANG comp? Or do you feel that having that savings invested has given you the long term security to feel comfortable, but perhaps if you’d made ~80% less over your career you’d be less satisfied?

That’s something I think about often. Sometimes I do wish I had plunged towards passions, but I know a lot of people who burned out by doing that.

I think my path was probably a good one; it really is very psychologically nice to not worry at all about money and be able to advance my career in any direction I want now without feeling like I am being selfish, or neglecting my responsibilities as a father, or whatever.

I also certainly learned a lot at Amazon (although the thing I learned most was “how to be effective inside Amazon,” which isn’t a particularly great skill in the long run!). So it was not so bad.

Re: My thoughts about the Principal role

#93

Post by cactus2093 »

This is a pet peeve of mine due to how common it is in all sorts of tech career advice, but I can never take a tech blogger/influencer seriously when they are so flippant about amounts of money that most people will never see in their entire lives.

If you look at salary info on a site like levels.fyi for top tech companies the difference between a senior vs staff vs principal engineer salary is pretty mind boggling. E.g. looking at Google right now, the annual total comp goes from $353k at senior level to $486k at staff level to $992k at the principal level. Just a cool million dollars a year on the table, and the author is saying things like "Nobody complains about a salary raise but optimize to career based on the salary is a quite bad idea if you are already covered." The whole piece is about how they just really like selflessly helping other engineers, and it's got nothing to do with pay or status.

It's not like we're just talking here about the difference between upgrading your car from a Toyota to a Lexus, or staying at a slightly nicer hotel when you go on a vacation. This is the ability to never worry amount money again for the rest of your life after just a couple of years in the role. It's the ability to retire 20 years younger or pay off your kid's 4 year ivy league education in just a year of savings or fund your own charity that helps thousands of people, or whatever else you might want to do in some of your wildest dreams.

I can't help but see it as anything other than a very obnoxious flex/virtue signal whenever people in elite tech roles make claims like this about how salary is so much less important than how much you're learning, and other things of that nature.

Re: My thoughts about the Principal role

#94

Post by spenczar5 »

lumost wrote: post #87
spenczar5 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sibling comment pretty much nailed it. I saved well over 75% of my income as a PE and have more than enough money accumulated, so I'm not worried. My wife works as well, and even though we're in a pretty expensive area (Seattle) and have a child, we're very comfortable. I get paid $110,000 per year, and have great benefits. It feels like plenty to me, even though I don't save nearly as much anymore. I agree it's…

Curious what a role in non-academic scientific computing looks like. How did you get into the field? what kind of companies have this kind of role?

Oh, I work at the University of Washington in the astronomy department - so, definitely academia. I am just classified as “professional research staff,” which distinguishes me from students and faculty.

As I mentioned below, I got into this field by emailing a professor out of the blue, essentially saying “Hi, I am a software engineer interested in working on astronomy software. What’s your world like?”

Re: My thoughts about the Principal role

#96

Post by redisman »

efnx wrote: post #2

Not only is it hard to define what the principal engineering role is, it will be different at almost every company. The same goes for staff eng and even to a lesser degree senior eng.

The special problem with Sr Engineer is that it’s most people’s title from year 5 to year 40. If you keep improving in your craft then it can be a very wide band.

I for one have no interest in being a tech lead or a staff engineer as all the non technical work exhausts and frustrates me endlessly. I’m still striving to improve every year at engineering and architecture.

Re: My thoughts about the Principal role

#97

Post by draw_down »

sokoloff wrote: post #19
version_five wrote: post #11

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…

If I had such a principal on my team, I’d be happy about that. It means that they’ve contributed to an overall team dynamic where the team does not depend on them personally to perform under pressure. Far worse is a team of on-call juniors who stand around jabbering cluelessly until someone decides to call in Principal Pat who fixes it in 15 minutes during the 7th hour of outage. If the team is on the right track, pr…

Great comment, sokoloff! Big thanks for coming out and posting it. Again, great work. [rocket emoji]

OK, that'll be 50 thousand dollars, please

Re: My thoughts about the Principal role

#98

Post by Spooky23 »

vp8989 wrote: 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 did a “principal” role with another name in a CTO organization. It got old quickly because you had no control, and it was difficult to actually accomplish anything.

The org evolved to a strategic devops role where we absorbed strategic platforms. “Principal” tech chops plus actual control of moats in the org translate into getting shit done.

IMO, unless “principal” is primarily a way to pay you more, you’re better off actually owning stuff than being “IT Yoda”. The same skills you think you’re avoiding in a management role are critical (and harder) for a technical leader.

Re: My thoughts about the Principal role

#99

Post by aprdm »

vp8989 wrote: 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…

Totally. It's also ridiculous difficult to change companies since your brain becomes pretty much the context of your current organization. It's IMO harder to apply to other companies as explaining your day-to-day requires a lot of context and nuance about your company that do not fit a resume.

Further to that, the interview process of staff/principal are usually akin to a senior dev with technical grinding except that isn't your day to day and hasn't been for a while.

Re: My thoughts about the Principal role

#100

Post by alistairSH »

andrey_utkin wrote: post #82
matthias509 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. If I’m not helping junior devs get their work done, I am failing as a PE.

Helping is activity, how do you evaluate the outcomes?

Unfortunately, it tends to be a bit "squishy" - task completion (by the PE or by junior team members), team velocity, etc can all be used, but using them exclusively is just asking for the team to game those metrics. Much better to have regular 1-on-1s with each person and just discuss progress - team progress, individual project/task progress, and any career goals. If somebody is actively seeking promotion, we'll use a job progression matrix (HR puts them together) and talk through the differentiators and what that employee can do to fill the gaps.
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