Probably because their engineering team has a bus factor of two? Title inflation is real. Why not just go all in? Need matching insignia on the collar, of course.
Konnstann 29 days ago root parent prev next [—]. 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. Same with IBM, very confusing. IC just means you don't have reports, and neither Staff nor Principal roles typically have reports. Yeah for us it means you have a team tech leadership role. Some people have to be doing. TBH I doubt the actual work people are doing has changed. Yes because everyone is resigning. Possibly they're just better than you were 2 years ago? Tech education moves as quickly as tech itself.
Yes, this. One company out there 'staff' is entry level. Whereas in all the companies I worked at 'staff' was a very prized title to have. Another company I worked at my title was basically just some random bits of roman numerals and something that sounded vaguely like a engineer. It more clearly demonstrates the career progression on your resume and you typically only get a reference check at your previous employer so putting an "inaccurate" title for jobs older than that is unlikely to matter.
Obviously don't inflate the titles. Are there many folks who care more for a title than compensation? Granted, a higher title might help one win more compensation when negotiating one's next job, but fundamentally one must back that up. Because if not, I need to have a discussion about titles! I'm not aware of companies caring what your current or last job title is when they hire you, and for that reason I don't think most developers care what title they get when taking a new job. The titles are really only important internally, if companies have a culture of respecting certain titles, or when they have strict salary bands for each job title that are matched to some supposed industry standard.
Salary bands are a blanket corporate policy that many companies use to enforce a very crude form of hiring discipline, and over time they can get really out of touch with reality always on the low side, of course. Some of these are stodgy old companies like you would expect, but some are also midwestern companies that are switching to a "remote first" model but still have salary bands calibrated to their low-COL city of origin.
Managers deal with unrealistic salary bands via title inflation when they can, but sometimes their hands are tied. I joined a team that did have the freedom to use title inflation and ended up with a principal title in a team with more principal engineers than non-principal engineers. 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.
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. Exactly it's just a job description and name. In my last job our org rarely promoted anyone technical only managers and above so almost everyone was either Lead Software Engineer, or Senior Software Engineer. Other orgs promoted everyone to the max no matter what they did - I knew a group where the lead was a Director but coded, and all of his reports where Principals; yet they did simpler work than anyone in our org did.
I'm a principal engineer for the next 3. The key element is that you are half technical and other half people. You could say the other half is political, but that's just what happens when you get a bunch of people together.
The key is that larger companies are hard to steer. You can't have N engineers in N directions, and you need to point them in direction. The way I look at it from a technical perspective is ensuring that the game being played is winnable. Is the project going to work? Or, is this a death march waiting to happen? Do people know what they need to do? Do they have the tools and knowledge? Are stake-holders bought into the picture?
Is funding going to endure the march? The title is entirely useless if you are not in a large organization. Turning the ship even 1 degree is a lot of talking and organizing I like to build, but I'm happy to never build a pyramid again. Not in my experience: there are typically specific project and program managers.
And in most cases, that's in addition to writing code. Not in my experience. I think a key thing is that a principal engineer is technical glue. You run around talking people getting insight on what is happening on the front-line, and then you nudge things in directions such that the game wins.
Does this meaning providing tactical insight for the project? Does this mean questioning priorities and aligning priorities? Does this mean that making sure the department is sustainable on hiring objectives? You could say that the role is being a smart technical person that is responsible at the level of "almost stake holder".
A key thing here is that a principal engineer should also have significant stock. At a big company, this should be in the seven figures.
When my partner and I first meet we were both senior engineers at larger SF tech companies. Three years later she is a principle engineer and I stayed a senior engineer. She and I agree that everything past a senior engineer is political.
She is much better and handling the complex social dynamics of the management class. It's kinda a game of finding the least common denominator that works best by not pissing off people and making everyone maximally happy. That often means the decisions you make you know are not the most optimal, but the most politically optimal.
Just our observations. 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 seem to be happy so far. That process is almost completely independent from meat-space concerns, aside from the requisite UX design. 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 team and coordinating work within that team. I would expect a "principle" developer to be working at a higher level coordinating work between multiple teams and making architectural decisions that cut across the whole org or a large subsection of it at a larger company.
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 size of team you need to be directly leading. 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. 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. Those are great points to consider, thank you. The political part is so important, and such a departure from solving technical problems. I feel like nothing in my life has prepared me for it, or maybe I just ignored everything that would have. I think there's a continuum of political savvy, though, where most developers have some level of it.
For example, if one of your developers creates a new service using a technology that is new to the codebase, and half of the senior developers say, "Ugh!
I'm not touching that. I'm not wasting my time figuring out that unnecessary academic crap," you can understand how that was a failure even if a purely technical evaluation concluded that the learning curve was reasonable and the benefits outweighed the effort required. Before committing to the technology, it was necessary to introduce the idea in a way that got the senior devs to buy in, and if you can't accomplish that, you can't use the technology at all, because it's going to create morale and social problems as well a creating an isolated service that few people will work on.
That's a basic level of political savvy I think most people can relate to, so, if you can understand that much, you have a base to build on. WastingMyTime89 29 days ago root parent next [—]. In my experience the issue experimented technical contributors have with politics is not savviness, it's managing frustration. Unless you enjoy playing politics for politics sake and value the grind of improving your position in the system, the mix of ineffective compromises and letting things rot because the blame will go the right way tends to wear you down in the long run.
Another way to look at it is you are expected to include business factors into your decision making. Sometimes the most optimal engineering solution is not the most optimal business solution. Politics can definitely be a factor, but being able explain clearly why doing something helps the business can be a big part of making the jump to more senior roles. A colleague of mine at previous company once described all this in two words "managing expectations" :. It goes beyond managing expectations.
What goals do you take? What goals do you ouah back against? How do you do this? How do you route around cranky groups that get nothing done?
Technical expertise and independence is expected of the level below senior, and in order to make the jump to senior you need to demonstrate leadership and other for skills - influencing others, project management, coordinating between teams, etc.
Principal is a level above that that is kind of the same but more. All this to say: every company is different. So the decisions I make are optimized for that. It helped me understand managements drive, to have folks doing useful things, but also made me question how useful much of this is except as busy work.
Nice post, I think "software engineering" is slowly becoming yet another "bullshit job". 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. Was a bit surprised, since i'd personally rather code and keep my skills up. My take is companies should have their top engineers spending a sigificant amount of time coding, or at least architecting, but I could imagine, and have read, that at FAANG sized companies it becomes more political?
Also with so many employees I guess in theory the idea is to have Principals spend more time leveling up the rest of their workforce? In practice does that happen? I accelerate my team.
I make sure almost all of what I do is well documented and communicated to the rest of my team. The important thing is good judgement on where to spend your time to have the most impact. My job is to help other engineers in our org be as productive as possible. 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. I am happy to be open here if it helps others. Sign out. Home India News Entertainment. HT Insight. My Account. Sign in. Inside the war for tech talent in India The size of the digital talent gap is summed up by the fact that India will struggle to meet tech resource requirements for the next years, according to industry data.
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