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My thoughts about the Principal role

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Re: My thoughts about the Principal role

#101

Post by yks »

spenczar5 wrote: post #94
lumost wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?”

That’s a dream of mine (astronomy and SWE) but alas earning money is a higher priority right now and unclear when that will change

Re: My thoughts about the Principal role

#102

Post by mavelikara »

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…

> a staff/principal role is basically going to be that of a co-manager with no authority.

The expectation is to be a leader without being a manager.

In many disciplines, to earn higher salaries you will have to produce/influence output at a level that might not be possible by one person. The way to get that kind of output is to mentor junior engineers.

Re: My thoughts about the Principal role

#103

Post by analog31 »

mavelikara wrote: post #102
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…

> a staff/principal role is basically going to be that of a co-manager with no authority. The expectation is to be a leader without being a manager. In many disciplines, to earn higher salaries you will have to produce/influence output at a level that might not be possible by one person. The way to get that kind of output is to mentor junior engineers.

That's been my role as a senior staff scientist. And at first glance, you'd wonder, well who in their right mind would want that? But it actually has its merits.

With authority comes a chain of authority. The manager is just projecting the authority of the manager above them, and so forth. That can translate into being a manager without being a leader or an authority. Also, if you rise to the expectation of being a leader, you might have a chance to actually get good at it, something that many good administrators never experience.

I've also been a manager. It was dull, and I knew that I would never be competitive at it, so I went back to the technical track.

Re: My thoughts about the Principal role

#104

Post by bradleyjg »

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #86
wfhbata wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you been able to maintain a similar level of compensation? I started my career in scientific computing, and was paid a pittance compared to what a PE is paid at a big tech company. I’m wondering if moving to scientific computing is a luxury afforded by putting in time at AWS.

It's still quite strange to me that we're at a point in tech where technical skill becomes a penalty. This is not to say that non-technical skills are not important and often more important, but for both myself and friends "getting paid well" and "working on hard problems" have become conflicting goals. There was a brief while, at the beginning of our current tech boom where strong technical skills were extremely val…

This is generally the way things go. That it wasn’t true at some point is the anomaly.

The generalized version is that anything widely desirable about a job other than money acts to push down wages. For example, if a position is widely respected, well most people like to be respected so wages are going to be less than if it wasn’t widely respected. Similarly, if there’s a lot of people that enjoy spending time with children then jobs that involve spending a lot of time with children aren’t going to pay as well as they would have otherwise. See also, games programming.

Re: My thoughts about the Principal role

#106

Post by jimlikeslimes »

sterlind wrote: post #49
tchalla wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have to tell myself every day not to go do the POC What is a "POC"? Side Rant : It's really helpful if an acronym is at least expanded in the first use. I don't find the acronym in the article or the parent comment. I am not sure why and how this is a norm but it's frustrating as someone who wants to understand a conversation.

Proof of Concept

Piece of Crap?

Re: My thoughts about the Principal role

#108

Post by paulz_ »

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…

> I think there is still a bit of a perception that IC levels higher than Senior are about "Senior but with more interesting technical problems". This is largely false.

Anyone know of a career path where this is actually the case? Lately it seems like everywhere I turn it's meetings and PowerPoint. Ideally I'd like to keep working on harder and harder engineering problems until I die of old age.

Re: My thoughts about the Principal role

#109

Post by proc0 »

vii wrote: post #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…

> 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.

I don't get this, these are marketing and business skills. I don't understand why tech roles don't leverage the full power of engineering and instead engineers are steered towards tangential specializations. This isn't true across the board of course, but how can companies not see the value of letting some engineers become the technical experts without needing all these related skills? Knowing advanced CS and information theory can help, if anything to keep the other engineers up to date (and I think it would involve technical leadership, just not in terms of managing others), but it's not valued at all and without those other skills it seems engineers just stay as "contributors" (i call this bottom feeders).

Re: My thoughts about the Principal role

#110

Post by plank_time »

25 years of experience, and I never wanted to get above Staff Engineer. The work is just not something that I enjoy. I love coding, and I like working directly with my team. When I applied to new companies, I purposefully applied at the Senior engineer level, not Staff or higher.

Sometimes I wonder if I should have just put on my big boy pants on and put in the extra work to get promoted, something my bosses actually asked me to do. And more especially when I see my peers become at a higher level, director, VP etc. But life is short and I never would have stayed in the business if I had to care about things that I fundamentally don’t care about. Almost dying a couple of years ago really helped gel my thoughts on that.

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