What do principle / staff engineers do? | Hacker News Reader

What do principle / staff engineers do?

13 pointsthrow_cheese9 comments

I was working in a small company that got sucked up big a bigger corp. now falling into the job ladder and I was given the above "grade".

I've no idea what someone like this does in a large company as there seems to be a lot of teams and groups to navigate.

My understanding is someone like this isn't a manager but they aren't really hands on either, depending on team size of course.

Anyone able to give me a "in the life of" explanation ?

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You don't get day to day supervision. Rather, you set your own agenda. Talk to product groups, figure out what could be new stuff. A lot of the work is prototyping and experimentation. It is easy to fall into rat holes. Ultimately, your performance review will come and you have to justify your existence (i.e. salary). Lots of freedom but also responsibility. I end up hacking a lot but many people at this level also have teams .. usually informally (i.e. people they work with for a particular project).

this is closer to my experiences than the people talking about nonstop meetings. I report directly to the cto and basically do whatever i want(as a staff eng, 100+ engineers) Two main criteria at our company is the breadth of work you do - instead of being the best on one project, its expected that you can hop in wherever needed. I don't get assigned tasks, bounce around between many teams, and am expected to be connected enough to know what needs doing. Also multiply others - identifying and/or solving a problem that makes everyone 10% more efficient, or training/teaching/etc.

The other thing expectation is product and business focus. Understanding how what youre doing affects the business, making changes that solve business problems. It's cool to make something 10% faster, but the expectation is you understand that if spending your time elsewhere will increase revenue, youll do that. Often I've found the product team assumes a thing is impossible, but if you understand the problems the business is facing, you can recommend the solution they thought was too hard to even bring to the eng team.

Yea, there are more meetings than as a regular engineer, and probably do less "work", but i dont find it political and your impact is larger in that you are making every other engineer better, and more control and input on the business.

Agreed with all you said. I'm curious how one manages their career at this level. I got my current gig due to some peculiar circumstances. I don't think companies interview for these positions. You need to have a track record or some kind of "in" (the original poster seems to have come in with an acquisition). I'm two years into my job so am not sure how this goes forward. Wish I had a mentor :)

Usually larger companies have some sort of mentor ship program. If that's not true in your case, you can always find someone individually and do it unofficially.

In big companies, the most successful Staff Engineers forge a symbiotic relationship with a manager at the equivalent level.

The two build trust where the Staff Engineer makes tech decisions and sets direction for the manager's teams in exchange for not having to deal with people or personnel issues as a titled manager. Much of the power without the direct accountability.

The manager, on the other hand, gets the awesome power of the Staff Engineer to deliver projects and handle the technical challenges while reaping most of the credit and rewards, in exchange for being held directly accountable for the teams.

Without this relationship, both halves are fairly useless. So my advice is to forge a relationship with a manager peer until you are ready to move on.

One of my pet peeves... It's principal, not principle. Sure, I hope principal engineers have principles, but that's not what their title says. Principal, as in "main engineer", not "engineer with scruples".

Generally, a principal engineer is one of the highest engineering titles (the only one above would be fellow), which means you are invited to management-only meetings, essentially.

I think a principle engineer would set and tune the morals for a group of people. If they did their job well, then the group would function fairly and efficiently.

Lead developer here, In my experience it's been:

- Setting up the dev team for success by helping select language/framework/tech stacks

- Helping other devs, sharing knowledge, training, tools

- Encourage good developer habits, testing, OOP/OOD/patterns where needed etc.

- Get team input and be point of contact with upper management

- Plan the technical/solution design/architecture of said app. Share with other team members, work through it, get everyone on board, setup foundation, go build.

- A bunch more but that's a good start.

To maintain this type of position, one is typically in non-stop meetings. Usually bullshit political meetings like who should be in charge of what, trying to convince executives to hire/fire/start/stop someone or something, trying to get money from executives, trying to keep other people from getting money or projects.

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