On Being a Principal Engineer
This rings true to my experience.
I'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.I enjoy the soft work I do, a lot of emotional labor for other developers, soft sells for tech/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.But I am also at this weird point where I am not sure if the title of "staff/principle" 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't, why we built some things the way we did, how things work currently, how the politics works and the trust I have built.In the past year, I have seen less than 5 job posting for a staff engineer.