Staff engineer means “you are now or have at some point in the past been an indispensable senior engineer at a fashionable tech company (this company inclusive)”.
Principal engineer means “you’ve made a lot of money, so you don't need to work for money any more, but we’d like to have you around so that our staff engineers have someone to look up to”.
This is obviously an incomplete/slightly tongue in cheek definition. The people playing these roles, of course, have a lot of “real” work to do. But there are a lot of senior people who are highly productive without these titles (like yourself, it seems).
Therefore, there’s a bit of an insecurity people carrying these titles are prone to, since it distinguishes them (and usually their salaries, to a highly significant degree) from their colleagues with equivalent years of experience and technical talent. Hence the websites you describe, where people try to make sense of the divergent path they find themselves in.
The titles themselves have been copied from Google, I believe. You can view them at https://levels.fyi
And then after those comes "Distinguished engineer/Engineering Fellow", which basically means: "You are famous enough that we pay you mostly to get a shiny halo effect from employing you. If you also solve some actual problems, yes please." People like Guido van Rossum and Simon Peyton Jones would fall into this bracket.
Principal engineer means “you’ve made a lot of money, so you don't need to work for money any more, but we’d like to have you around so that our staff engineers have someone to look up to”.
Having been a "Principal Engineer" at a large tech company, that wasn't my full experience. Yes, the pay was great, but the role was more about driving large, multi-team and discipline projects. Client, server, security, etc. all at once.
Coasting was absolutely possible, since none of my managers (of the three I had there) had similar levels of engineering experience nor did they seem particularly interested in anything except whether things were on schedule or not. In that time, I did have face time with multiple folks at C-level and EVP level. Those folks actually did get it and understand the value of the work, it was the middle management that had the gap.
I'm sorry that I came off as belittling these roles. They are valuable, and I didn't mean to imply that coasting was a norm. The principals and staff engineers I've known have been brilliant technical minds.
I was attempting to describe how somebody with 20 years of quality IC experience (OP) could have steered inadvertently away from the Staff+ path. I admit that I didn't do Principal justice, I was merely trying to distinguish it from Staff (since they're fairly similar job descriptions).
To redo that attempt: Staff+ opportunities go to people with leverage ("indispensable senior engineer", "made enough money to retire early") and interest (choosing to continue working, choosing to take on the title), who are working in the subsection of the industry that chooses to cede leverage to engineers.
There aren't a lot of them to go around, compared to the number of qualified engineers, so a lot of the initial qualifications are circumstantial. I don't think the fact that they're circumstantial (everything is circumstantial, after all) takes away from their ability to drive big positive change in an org, and the pride one should take in that. Somebody has to do it!
Hah, I didn't take offense. I've seen and worked with quite a few Principals where I questioned what they actually did. Lots of them produced many documents and zero results and coasted based on that.
Comments
Staff engineer means “you are now or have at some point in the past been an indispensable senior engineer at a fashionable tech company (this company inclusive)”.
Principal engineer means “you’ve made a lot of money, so you don't need to work for money any more, but we’d like to have you around so that our staff engineers have someone to look up to”.
This is obviously an incomplete/slightly tongue in cheek definition. The people playing these roles, of course, have a lot of “real” work to do. But there are a lot of senior people who are highly productive without these titles (like yourself, it seems).
Therefore, there’s a bit of an insecurity people carrying these titles are prone to, since it distinguishes them (and usually their salaries, to a highly significant degree) from their colleagues with equivalent years of experience and technical talent. Hence the websites you describe, where people try to make sense of the divergent path they find themselves in.
The titles themselves have been copied from Google, I believe. You can view them at https://levels.fyi
And then after those comes "Distinguished engineer/Engineering Fellow", which basically means: "You are famous enough that we pay you mostly to get a shiny halo effect from employing you. If you also solve some actual problems, yes please." People like Guido van Rossum and Simon Peyton Jones would fall into this bracket.
Having been a "Principal Engineer" at a large tech company, that wasn't my full experience. Yes, the pay was great, but the role was more about driving large, multi-team and discipline projects. Client, server, security, etc. all at once.
Coasting was absolutely possible, since none of my managers (of the three I had there) had similar levels of engineering experience nor did they seem particularly interested in anything except whether things were on schedule or not. In that time, I did have face time with multiple folks at C-level and EVP level. Those folks actually did get it and understand the value of the work, it was the middle management that had the gap.
I'm sorry that I came off as belittling these roles. They are valuable, and I didn't mean to imply that coasting was a norm. The principals and staff engineers I've known have been brilliant technical minds.
I was attempting to describe how somebody with 20 years of quality IC experience (OP) could have steered inadvertently away from the Staff+ path. I admit that I didn't do Principal justice, I was merely trying to distinguish it from Staff (since they're fairly similar job descriptions).
To redo that attempt: Staff+ opportunities go to people with leverage ("indispensable senior engineer", "made enough money to retire early") and interest (choosing to continue working, choosing to take on the title), who are working in the subsection of the industry that chooses to cede leverage to engineers.
There aren't a lot of them to go around, compared to the number of qualified engineers, so a lot of the initial qualifications are circumstantial. I don't think the fact that they're circumstantial (everything is circumstantial, after all) takes away from their ability to drive big positive change in an org, and the pride one should take in that. Somebody has to do it!
Hah, I didn't take offense. I've seen and worked with quite a few Principals where I questioned what they actually did. Lots of them produced many documents and zero results and coasted based on that.