Interesting article. A lot of the qualities the author descrives as required trains of a principal are things I always say a senior engineer/tech team lead should have—e.g. ability to act as a force multiplier, leading by example, and being active in less technical activities like mentorship and recruiting. Am I off the mark? I suspect I may just not have been at enough orgs with a well developed career track, what t…
This depends on the culture & hiring philosophies of the company. I've seen many places that "only hire the best" or "only hire seniors" then end up with a bunch of engineers who dont mentor or force multiply but tend to just focus on what ever pice of a system they own. I've also seen senior used only to justify a pay bracket as well. Personally I agree that a senior or lead enginner needs to have these skills.
In my book, it's beneficial to stop thinking in titles, and start thinking like trades, in tasks. As a team you have to execute a number of incoming tasks. Tasks collide with a team member, and they can either handle the task or they can't. If they can't, they can ask a more experienced member to split up the task into more manageable pieces.
This has a powerful effect - you can usually add less experienced people to the system to get more throughput. As long as someone can split their own time consuming tasks into simpler tasks they can delegate, there is more throughout to be had.
And this in turn teaches people about the technology involved. Yes, you're just following instructions, but you should be picking up knowledge about configuration management, application management, databases, terraform, and so on along the way.
And with that, it's a lot easier to find people, because we can hire people directly from education. And I'm ethically fine with hiring people from education, because we're teaching them a broad set of valuable skills.
Sorry for the rant. I've been discussing the whole senior shortage for far too long.