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What does a Principal Software Engineer do?

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Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?

#151

Post by ipaddr »

xmprt wrote: post #106
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…

On the flip side, having a title is a good way to know if you're being compensated appropriately. If you see someone 2 levels above you working on much less impactful projects then perhaps it's time to have a conversation with your manager about pay or time to start looking for new jobs.

Why do you feel you should be paid more because you feel you are doing more work? You are paid the least amount possible to fill your position during the hiring cycle. Your worth is what the market will pay you.

The fact that someone else is doing more or less with a higher title shouldn't influence your life at all. Jealousy shouldn't tell you when you should look for a job. If you are unhappy leave if you are happy stay. If your happiness is determined by what a random person is paid you will never be happy.

Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?

#152

Post by vasco »

trgn wrote: post #121
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…

That's all true, and yet, and yet. > and seeing your influence grow as you are trusted with more things. That's the ideal scenario, that you earn the esteem and trust of your peers because the work you do speaks for itself. The flipside with this is, this process takes time. It really takes years. Sometimes there will not be that time. You are a new hire brought in to do a high-impact thing; or a high-impact project…

I agree and go further to say I've seen people with demonstrated contributions suddenly clearly being more valued when they get a title, to the point that nothing changes about what they do but others rate the impact as being larger after a promotion, to the point that they eventually are actually having larger impact just because others now believe they can / should.

I've also seen the opposite, perfectly fine engineers get worse after a promotion due to the weight of the title, without any other change to their work / schedule.

Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?

#153

Post by ipaddr »

closeparen wrote: post #64
Konnstann wrote: post #20

Earlier 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?

The only job in the tech industry that's not some sort of leadership role is Intern. Everyone leads and mentors. Senior Engineers at the level of a single team, with perhaps some cross-team impact. Staff Engineers at the level of an org with several teams.

Many are lucky enough to work on their own or with other seniors in their respected domains.

Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?

#154

Post by kelnos »

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.

When I started at Twilio, I set my title on whatever chat we were using to something silly like "Director of Naptime Initiatives". (Well, ok, when I started we just had a poorly-used internal IRC server, so I guess this was a bit later when we got HipChat or whatever.) Sadly, these days the title field on Slack is synced with Active Directory, which has the human-readable title name, plus the level number.

It's really dehumanizing. I think I'd rather not know people's titles, just what team they're on, and their role.

Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?

#155

Post by commandlinefan »

pc86 wrote: post #28
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or more generally: Job titles aren’t portable between companies in the tech industry. Don’t assume that they mean the same thing at every company. Don’t assume a company is underpaying people just because they’re giving out Principal Software Engineer titles. Principal Software Engineer at one company could just be the equivalent of Senior Software Engineer II at another company. On the hiring side, everyone knows th…

As someone whose first job title was "Assistant Director of IT," and who did nothing but write really bad PHP for a couple hours every day, this tracks with my experience. It also made interviewing harder because if you get a resume from someone with one job they've had for two years, and that job is Assistant Director, you're probably - rightfully - trashing that resume. I eventually learned to just change the title…

I had a job as a VP a few years back… at a six-person startup. I cringe when I list that job on my resume - do I lie and list the title accurately (I was a programmer with a massively inflated title) or report what my actual given title was and risk being seen as misleading?

Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?

#156

Post by kelnos »

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 certainly doesn't make you a bad anything. Your level of ambition is a personal thing. It's yours alone, and no one gets to look down on it[0]. This idea that a person's worth is tied to how far they want to and are able to go in their career is something that needs to die.

If you're happy with where you are, and happy with your salary and status, then it's fine to stay there! Certainly, as you say, continue to learn new things, make quality contributions, and get your work done.

Many companies will have what they call "terminal levels" for individual contributors (most probably don't really advertise this unless you specifically talk about it with your manager). The idea is that you can work at a level where you can get your day-to-day work done with minimal guidance, even if you need guidance on the bigger picture stuff (like what you should be working on, and why). You should certainly talk to your manager about this, if you feel comfortable. And if you don't, and/or they keep pushing you to climb the ladder further, then yeah, you should probably find a new gig.

One caveat: ageism is still an unfortunate thing in our industry, and as you get into your 40s and beyond, if you're still "only" a "senior software engineer", you may have trouble getting new jobs.

Companies don't want to get stuck with people who are perpetually "junior" and need a lot of hand-holding to get their jobs done. That's of course ok for a while someone is learning and growing, but if they aren't growing out of that, they're a liability and time sink. But once you're past that point, you should be ok. The only problem is if you end up at a weird place where no one wants to progress up through staff/principal/architect/fellow, in which case I wouldn't be surprised if everyone starts getting pressured to up their ambition. But that sort of scenario seems somewhat unlikely?

[0] Well, unless they are in your immediate family and your lack of ambition is putting their livelihood at risk in ways they can't mitigate. But I'm assuming that's not the case here ;)

Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?

#157

Post by kelnos »

MillenialMan wrote: post #40
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or more generally: Job titles aren’t portable between companies in the tech industry. Don’t assume that they mean the same thing at every company. Don’t assume a company is underpaying people just because they’re giving out Principal Software Engineer titles. Principal Software Engineer at one company could just be the equivalent of Senior Software Engineer II at another company. On the hiring side, everyone knows th…

The vast majority of titles in tech confer more prestige than deserved, because there's no downside to a company handing them out like candy. I don't look at it as a portability issue, the incentive isn't to be accurate to begin with. Inflated seniority is just a perk they can offer that doesn't cost them any money, so everyone offers it. Titles across the industry are meaningless unless you're calibrated to that com…

> there's no downside to a company handing them out like candy.

Some companies believe this, but I don't think it's true. Handing out titles like candy can kill morale.

Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?

#158

Post by sciurus »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #80

> To achieve the “org-level” impact, principal engineers need to be very selective on what to work on and use as much leverage as they can. For example, to set them up for success and maximize their influence, a principal engineer usually directly reports to a “director-level” engineering leader. Whoa, that is a cynical take and smells a little of sour grapes. I 100% agree that the PE title is abused both out of nepo…

> There are some engineers that are so good at solving problems that they can be dropped into any crisis situation and help fix it... Those are your PEs.

I agree that "the solver" is one flavor of the role, but I think there are a few other valid ones too. Many of the staff+ engineers I've interacted with fall in the "tech lead" or "architect" category.

https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-archetypes

Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?

#159

Post by jim_and_derrick »

Work at a large shit hole place. I'm so content on doing nothing and getting paid. Used to work hard but then management ruined it all. Now if i try hard, nothing comes of it so there is no point. If anything, people get upset when you try to actually solve problems, ask hard questions, or generally make progress.

I started doing a 2nd & 3rd job now actually as a consultant during the day. My clients? Old co-workers and such that i established great working relationships with. They dont give a shit about titles and know me (or the other guy who does good work but has meh title). I'm getting paid 3x my shitty day job salary as hourly rate.

Honestly now it's a god damn sitcom. I write code for like 5 hours a week and produce more value then all these high paid numbskulls in our org. Pull an extra 10-20 hours of consulting during the week and suddenly i'm the one laughing and smiling. Instead of being salty at the mckinsey fuckwads who come in , make shit loads more than me and do nothing.

I'll never forget the one super high paid data engineer from mckinsey. His linkedin reads like a corporate synergistic bonergasm for suits. His solution to all of our data problems? Oh man just put it in redis, redis is faster than a relational DB. thanks you dingus, take you zillion dollar contract $$$ and go frigg off to some other soulless corporation.

Re: What does a Principal Software Engineer do?

#160

Post by lr1970 »

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.

People get promoted until they reach their level of incompetence :-)

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