Comment by scarface_74 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scarface_74 | Hacker News Reader

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It doesn’t matter how good you are as a developer, you can only have so much impact coding 40 hours a week. I wanted to move up both to increase my autonomy and my vision is much larger than the amount of work I can physically do with my own hands.

As a 50 year old who has been doing this for awhile, I can and have:

- spent time on zoom calls and flown out to customer’s sites to gather requirements and help close a sale (cloud consulting).

- developed and managed implementation plans

- been both a dev lead and a lead for cloud architecture projects

- can be your standard, experienced enterprise developer

- I know almost every type of database out there and best practices for each

- can set up a “Well Architected” AWS account from an empty account including pipelines to deploy to EC2, Lambda or Kubernetes (EKS).

But I can only do one at a time. My “impact” comes from companies knowing that I can credibly speak to all of the individuals involved and they can fly me out to a customer’s site without me embarrassing them

What you're describing is actually not that different from my own conception of what a senior principal SWE is. Simply stated, I would define that level as a very experienced, knowledgeable, competent SWE whose main value to the org isn't in KLOCs they personally write but as a force multiplier who sees around corners (but also writes their fair share of KLOCs).

What turns me off about the version of an L7 SWE as described in the OP's link is the extent to which it doesn't sound like that at all. Maybe it's my bias against BigTech career ladders, but reading between the lines it sounds to me like it's more about navigating organization, political, and bureaucratic obstacles and attending a lot of meetings and generally being seen to be doing these things.

The point of my comment is that perhaps it is rational for an org like Dropbox to value the ability to do that more highly, but I've been in those roles and I found them personally to be soul-crushing.

When I am managing very large cloud projects, I still have to deal with the client’s different departments priorities, fiefdoms, dealing with the operations side wanting everything locked down and the developers wanting the freedom to do what they want. It’s part of dealing with any large organization.

I got an offer to be a “staff architect” at the company that I acquired the startup I worked for before going to AWS. I would have been responsible for strategy across all of their acquisitions.

While the technical requirements didn’t worry me. I had never seen how a large product company worked at that level and didn’t have confidence I could pull it off from an organizational level. Before going to AWS I worked at small companies.

I did know the expectations in consulting. But in all large organizations you have to deal with that. It’s the nature of the beast.

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