I would highly recommend reading articles/guides in https://staffeng.com/ for Staff+/Principal career path. They also have a podcast!
What does a Principal Software Engineer do?
111–120 of 176 posts
Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?
#112For anyone who is a Principal Engineer at a FAANG, what do you do day to day? I'm a Principal Engineer, not at a FAANG, and that mostly means i'm an expert at what I do and know the product inside and out, and I spend a good amount of time coding. I do also help others, answer questions, and deal with complex problems. I'd say I do 80% coding and 20% meetings / other things. I interviewed somewhere else and they want…
It depends. On the whole my responsibilities are a mix of things: 1. Technical strategy - primarily writing strategy docs and discussing with other tech PEs. Usually precursor to architecture. 2. Business Strategy - reviews with non tech staff and leadership (across the org) about what the business needs are, where we see the future going. Often takes the form of reviewing other peoples documents or contributing sect…
I'm in love with #9. Looks like you have a good handle on the situation. The rest proves you're going places.
Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?
#113Having been at several companies, I think I was happiest about my career when I didn’t have a fancy title and did not really know anyone else’s either (aside from obvious managers). It was nicer just knowing who’s in charge of what thing , and seeing your influence grow as you are trusted with more things . When I see titles, it just makes unhelpful thoughts enter my head, like: are all these people “at my level” rea…
> when you encounter people that clearly suck at what they do, and they’re 1-2 levels above you
I think this is a logical contradiction. If there exists people that you are in a position to judge their competence you deserve to be in their position or higher, therefore it cannot be that they are 1-2 levels higher than you.
Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?
#114Always keep in mind that sometimes the "principal engineer" title is just a company's only way of hiring a senior engineer because their pay bands are so far below market rate. Don't let a description of a Google principal engineer scare you away from inquiring and applying for principal engineer positions at other companies. Source: have been that person.
Title inflation is real. 2 years ago I was hired as Staff with pretty high bar to clear. This year I know a team where all the seniors complain they’re not Staff, and now half the team are Staff engs.
i had a job where i was the first staff, but when they started promoting everyone to staff cause every senior wanted a promotion, they had to create new levels of staff to differentiate
Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends. On the whole my responsibilities are a mix of things: 1. Technical strategy - primarily writing strategy docs and discussing with other tech PEs. Usually precursor to architecture. 2. Business Strategy - reviews with non tech staff and leadership (across the org) about what the business needs are, where we see the future going. Often takes the form of reviewing other peoples documents or contributing sect…
I'm in love with #9. Looks like you have a good handle on the situation. The rest proves you're going places.
I admit #9 is fun but I try not to do too much #9, because there's a huge risk to doing too much of that: losing touch with what's important to the bottom line, and indirectly influencing all the other ICs that prototypes get you promoted. That's just not true in my company. My prototypes are usually for exploring something important to the company or validating a tech hypothesis of some sort. I try to spend more time writing production code where possible.
Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in love with #9. Looks like you have a good handle on the situation. The rest proves you're going places.
I admit #9 is fun but I try not to do too much #9, because there's a huge risk to doing too much of that: losing touch with what's important to the bottom line, and indirectly influencing all the other ICs that prototypes get you promoted. That's just not true in my company. My prototypes are usually for exploring something important to the company or validating a tech hypothesis of some sort. I try to spend more tim…
I meant I love the way you phrased it.
A lot of programmers ignore the fact that they're serving a business function.
Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was under the impression that Staff just meant you have some sort of leadership role, as opposed to just being an individual contributor. Is that not the case?
Someone should tell HBO that, their Staff titles come before Senior Software Engineer, which is very confusing.
Same with IBM, very confusing
Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?
#118For anyone who is a Principal Engineer at a FAANG, what do you do day to day? I'm a Principal Engineer, not at a FAANG, and that mostly means i'm an expert at what I do and know the product inside and out, and I spend a good amount of time coding. I do also help others, answer questions, and deal with complex problems. I'd say I do 80% coding and 20% meetings / other things. I interviewed somewhere else and they want…
Staff/principal level here. I accelerate my team. Sometimes that involves writing code, sometimes that involves teaching/mentoring others, sometimes it means improving our tools and processes, sometimes it involves hammer out our architecture and security approach, and sometimes it involves figuring out what baroque process I need to go through in order to get legal’s approval to launch our new product. I make sure a…
this is a great summary, and pretty much exactly reflects my role. My job is to help other engineers in our org be as productive as possible. That always means trying to include other people in what I'm doing from a mentor/career-development perspective, but otherwise follows your % splits pretty well.
The bits that people don't talk about frequently are things like "what do you actually do in the 20% of the time you are coding?" It's usually things like performance analyses and optimizations, solving misc tech debt that I have the flexibility to work on since my time isn't allocated to project teams/squads, architecture and PoC work for new capabilities we think we will need, and honestly sometimes its just picking up a couple super low level tasks anyone could do because keeping team members focused on other things is what's most important.
At least in my org the common theme is almost always "there's a hard problem over there, go help them fix it'.
Source: principal engineer for a couple years, senior for 6 or 7 years before that. Not at a FAANG, but in a ~350 person technology org at a company with nationwide offices and consumer product presence in the USA.
Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
I admit #9 is fun but I try not to do too much #9, because there's a huge risk to doing too much of that: losing touch with what's important to the bottom line, and indirectly influencing all the other ICs that prototypes get you promoted. That's just not true in my company. My prototypes are usually for exploring something important to the company or validating a tech hypothesis of some sort. I try to spend more tim…
I meant I love the way you phrased it. A lot of programmers ignore the fact that they're serving a business function.
Thanks :)
It does feel like some folks ignore the business side of things but I think I enjoy being a part of the larger picture. It's definitely not for everyone. I know several people who are personally happy and have had WILDLY successful careers being hands-on tech specialists and ignoring the business side. It's great that it works for them.
Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?
#120Always keep in mind that sometimes the "principal engineer" title is just a company's only way of hiring a senior engineer because their pay bands are so far below market rate. Don't let a description of a Google principal engineer scare you away from inquiring and applying for principal engineer positions at other companies. Source: have been that person.
I've seen this exactly. Someone at my former company was a Principal engineer but when they left to go to Netflix they were then just a Sr. Engineer. They definitely were not Principal engineer material so think it was all to appease the pay-band gods.
Netflix doesn't have SWE titles other than "Senior" and "New Grad", so this means nothing about your former colleague.