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What does a Principal Software Engineer do?

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Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?

#131

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

frizzle112 wrote: post #84
nicoburns wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a lead or principle, I describe what I do as being a "fire-and-forget resource". I build everything myself and don't require supervision. I will deliver regardless and am also able to justify my decisions. People seem to be happy so far. Terminology is subjective of course, but: I would also expect the above from a "senior" developer. I would expect a "lead" developer to additionally be involved in leading a tea…

I think it depends on the complexity of what you're building. If it's something very novel or something that requires a lot of domain or technical expertise, then you might need a principal engineer to be the point person to figure out how to even build it, or build it right. Some problems are best solved by a single person with the right skills. Some career ladders allow for this, others are more rigid about the siz…

I think this is the appropriate answer. In my experience as Staff engineer, the tasks I was best suited to were the nebulously defined "the customer needs X" where X cross cut a lot of domains and required input from a variety of people that would be affected by that feature X. This usually meant that I'd have to get them all together at some point and find a way to satisfy all their contradictory needs before even coming up with what the real task definition of X was.

That's generally more than you'd expect from a typical Senior Engineer.

Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?

#132

Post by LargeWu »

CodeMage wrote: post #127
makecheck wrote: post #92

Having 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…

I'm waiting to find a place that won't push me to keep advancing up the career ladder, without leaving my salary lagging behind the rising cost of living. Does having limited ambition make you a bad dev/engineer, if you keep learning new things and contributing quality code at your current level of responsibility?

It doesn't make you a bad engineer, but it does, generally, put a ceiling on the value you are able to provide to the company. Individual contributors can only get so much done in a given amount of time, and over a long enough time scale, are generally interchangeable with one another.

Sure, you might have some specialized knowledge or understand system X better than anybody else, but there's diminishing returns on that, hence why you won't get big raises forever.

As you move up the chain, it eventually stops being about your direct technical contributions and about your ability to multiply the value of everybody under you in your org.

Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?

#133

Post by burnished »

soheil wrote: post #113
makecheck wrote: post #92

Having 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.

Do people get what they deserve? It seems unclear. Therefor, no logical contradiction.

Logic is a great tool by the way, but unless you are applying it formally you might be better off not trying to invoke it casually.

Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?

#134

Post by zhengyi13 »

pradn wrote: post #98
makecheck wrote: post #92

Having 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…

You hit the nail on the head. It was very different coming from Microsoft, where people's title and level (about one-two levels corresponded to a particular title) were visible in every chat dialog, to Google where you can edit your title to anything you want and levels can be seen only by going to a tool and looking it up specifically.

I've personally set my title to "Shennanigans Regularly Effected".

Also, lots of folk deliberately opt out of level visibility, too.

Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?

#135

Post by skeeter2020 »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #125
makecheck wrote: post #92

Having 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…

I hadn't thought about it in this context before, but I used to train Kendo ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kendo ), a Japanese martial art, a long time ago. One interesting thing is that Kendo doesn't have belts like most other martial arts, the principle being that seeing the color of someone's belt causes you to prejudge their ability. Ideally, you should only know how good they are by actually training/fighting w…

>> somehow it never seems to be the case that the ability outstrips the title.

Really? You've never worked with a junior who's punching far above their weight? I've had several on my team and work as hard as I can to get them promoted asap.

Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?

#136

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #135
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hadn't thought about it in this context before, but I used to train Kendo ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kendo ), a Japanese martial art, a long time ago. One interesting thing is that Kendo doesn't have belts like most other martial arts, the principle being that seeing the color of someone's belt causes you to prejudge their ability. Ideally, you should only know how good they are by actually training/fighting w…

>> somehow it never seems to be the case that the ability outstrips the title. Really? You've never worked with a junior who's punching far above their weight? I've had several on my team and work as hard as I can to get them promoted asap.

OK, perhaps I should have said "rarely." I've had direct reports who were like that and happily gave them the max rating on Performance Reviews and recommended promotions.

That said, it definitely gets rarer the higher up you go.

Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?

#137

Post by tehjoker »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #136
skeeter2020 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> somehow it never seems to be the case that the ability outstrips the title. Really? You've never worked with a junior who's punching far above their weight? I've had several on my team and work as hard as I can to get them promoted asap.

OK, perhaps I should have said "rarely." I've had direct reports who were like that and happily gave them the max rating on Performance Reviews and recommended promotions. That said, it definitely gets rarer the higher up you go.

Peter principle

Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?

#138

Post by 7thaccount »

nicoburns wrote: post #9
jason-phillips wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That often means the decisions you make you know are not the most optimal, but the most politically optimal. Not intended to quibble, but to me that smacks of the dreaded "mid-level management" tier. As a lead or principle, I describe what I do as being a "fire-and-forget resource". I build everything myself and don't require supervision. I will deliver regardless and am also able to justify my decisions. People se…

> As a lead or principle, I describe what I do as being a "fire-and-forget resource". I build everything myself and don't require supervision. I will deliver regardless and am also able to justify my decisions. People seem to be happy so far. Terminology is subjective of course, but: I would also expect the above from a "senior" developer. I would expect a "lead" developer to additionally be involved in leading a tea…

This gets tough. My company also loosely views Senior as the pinnacle of technical achievement with Lead and Principal engineers essentially being much higher level with no direct reports, but still doing policy, stakeholder, and political activities. Recently, some have pointed out the flaws in such a system as it leaves out the potential for promoting and giving a pay raise to senior staff that have continued making themselves far more valuable, but don't want to be capped or go into politics. There needs to be a path for someone who is just beast on the technical side and can be brought out to solve any problem. If that person is an order of magnitude more knowledgeable than your seniors, then they deserve to be distinguished as such. Our competitors that have figured this out have titles to better reflect this reality.

Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?

#139

Post by [deleted] »

CodeMage wrote: post #127
makecheck wrote: post #92

Having 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…

I'm waiting to find a place that won't push me to keep advancing up the career ladder, without leaving my salary lagging behind the rising cost of living. Does having limited ambition make you a bad dev/engineer, if you keep learning new things and contributing quality code at your current level of responsibility?

[deleted]

Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?

#140

Post by rightbyte »

idunno246 wrote: post #114
throwarayes wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why not just go all in?

* Engineer First Class

* Special Engineer

* First Engineer

* Staff Engineer

* Staff Engineer First Class

* Principal Engineer

* Staff Engineer Major

* Principal Engineer First Class

* Staff Engineer of the Office

etc. Need matching insignia on the collar, of course.

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