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.
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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.