On Being a Principal Engineer
This rings true to my experience.
I&#x27;m a Staff engineer and of my 40 hour week about 10-15 of those hours are interviews, meetings, and answering questions. Questions about technical feasibility, architectural discussions and planning, long term strategic planning, and lots of one offs from other developers.<p>I enjoy the soft work I do, a lot of emotional labor for other developers, soft sells for tech&#x2F;feature work around the company, process strategy and such. I never expected this to be such a large part of my job, and how much value comes from it.<p>But I am also at this weird point where I am not sure if the title of &quot;staff&#x2F;principle&quot; can be transferred to another company. A lot of the value that I add now is because of the historical knowledge I have. What we have tried as a company, what we haven&#x27;t, why we built some things the way we did, how things work currently, how the politics works and the trust I have built.<p>In the past year, I have seen less than 5 job posting for a staff engineer.