> A Principal Engineer should be just as valued and well-treated as a CTO. Most companies fail to do this, so everyone wants to be the CTO. Establish a career track, where technical people aspire to technical positions.

I spent my whole career avoiding engineering management and trying to grow in the pure technical leadership direction. One day I realized that for every staff engineer there are 10 managers, for every principal there are 5 senior managers, etc.

Turns out management is not so bad and companies seem to appreciate that kind of help a lot more

edit: also as a manager you get to work on all those pesky “It’s a people problem, actually” parts of engineering which is pretty fun. Every time in technical leadership where it felt like “Well we’ve got the plan now we just gotta incentivize doing the plan” you’re the one doing the incentivizing yay!