Principal Software Engineer
Published by Joost Baaij on 27 May 2021
Antón Rodríguez pointed out a great way to name experienced and broadly capable software engineers: Principal. I have adopted it for myself.
Corporate ladder
It relates to the classic career path for software engineers: first you’re a developer, then you’re a project lead, and in order to even just keep up eventually you’re promoted to manager, with staff reporting to you, and before long you’re not a coder anymore.
Antón’s post My thoughts about the Principal role explains it perfectly, and completely resonated with me. I like building things and I would like to keep my knowledge current. I’m not a big fan of meetings and I loathe “correcting” underlings because they did not use the new cover sheet on their TPS reports.