My thoughts about the Principal role

As someone adjacent to this role, a lot of the time this sort of "hands off" behavior is incentivized; the reason the principal is not jumping in and taking point on making the final decision and implementing is because that severely reduces the agency and ownership of the senior devs below them (and in many companies risk undercutting the latter's career progression, if it depends on them showing that independent ownership).

This post is good in that it doesn't try to define what a principal engineer is, but just give the author's opinion on what their job is.

One thing I realized with getting jobs with increasing degrees of ambiguity and autonomy is that you can _somewhat_ make it what you want. If it turns out that what you want aligns with what is needed, then things go super well.

The other thingis that titles are just a construct. They're nice badges that help rewarding people by giving ego instead of money. being a principal in a startup is different from being one at Amazon is different from being one at Facebook.

It is supposed to be a super-smart engineer who is extremely vertical in multiple disciplines, can solve complex problems, and can navigate politics.

I worked at Intel. A principal engineer in the process or architecture was vastly different than a principal engineer elsewhere. For the most part, you become a principal engineer by sticking around, doing lots of extra work, and making at least several major contributions in your career that impact multiple products' bottom line or viability. As a bonus there is a weird deferred-income strategy they use that helps you avoid taxes, your regular bonus multipliers skyrocket, and you are expected to work 24/7.

However, I witnessed several abuses where:

- You can become one if you are friends with an upper manager who scoots you ahead in the line. Several times I saw this type of PE later pushed out by new management, because it was painfully obvious they were in over their heads to everyone else.

- You can become one if you are in a small group that wants to justify its existence. Every group needs a principal engineer, and without one, it is a risk the group will be dissolved. Some managers of tiny groups like their ego trip and want to continue being big fish in small ponds.

- And you can become one if your work a site that hands them out to puff up its image. In the latter case, there was one non-US site that was almost 40% principal engineers, and used that as their claim to fame. "We have the most principal engineers at our site" said the VP. Duh! You are also the VP that approved all of them so you could say that!

So while Intel's definition makes sense and is generally true, it is abused about ... ~35% of the time?

Disclaimer: Intel is an up or out company. You move up, or you move out. It is hard to hover in certain high-pressure divisions. I was passed over twice for PE and shuffled between divisions, and eventually exhausted to the point where i was "out". So i'm a tad bit bitter.

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

I've been considering down-leveling or getting into some software niche where technical expertise is actually valued and existentially necessary to the business.

I'm in a PE role, and I have to tell myself every day not to go do the POC because that's not how I can maximize my impact. If someone else can do that work, I'm going to try and lean on them.

Strategy is hard. Much harder than I thought it would be. I am unable to make progress on strategy when I'm deep in tactical work.

I do jump in when needed, but every time I get my hands dirty I fall behind on strategy.

Your PE may indeed be useless, but it's also possible they are pretty good at their job. Good strategy is boring and seems obvious when presented because it creates clarity across a diverse company.