
Ask HN: Is Principal Engineer the New Senior Engineer? - tossarooni
I recently saw a posting from a 5-10 year old, post Series B Bay Area company with $XX million raised seeking a Principal Engineer for $130k&#x2F;year.<p>This is at odds with what the title connotates to me and I assume others who have been around for a while. To me, your Principal Eng is the guy or girl who built the whole damn thing for you when you were just working out of your kitchen. They have an encyclopedic knowledge of the platform. They do things like patch custom behavior into gdb to debug nightmare bugs. This is their last job, even if they are not old.<p>Is this the beginning of a trend where the title Principal Engineer loses all meaning like Senior already has? What title will we move to once Principal Eng no longer conveys meaning?
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davismwfl
Being on the older end of startup life and having been in industry for quite a
bit over 20 years now I have seen lots of trends. I think what we are seeing
now with the "principal engineer" title which use to be very reserved, and
rarely used in a startup ever is exactly as you say. The fact essentially new
grads are wanting to be called senior engineers is the problem. Personally, it
drives me nuts, you are not a senior software engineer with 3 years of
experience, but that is what I see being done consistently. I don't care if
you worked at 1 or 10 startups in those three years, you are still pretty
fresh and maybe at best mid-level but even then I'd err on the side of jr. To
me, Jr is 1 to 3 or 4 years, mid is from there to 8-10 years and senior is
typically 8-10+ years (although exceptions always exist). To me that time
behind the keyboard is what means you have solved a lot of diverse problems,
have seen many different business problems and have learned how to communicate
and solve problems without writing a single line of code.

What I notice though is a lot of these people somehow feel not being a senior
engineer is a slight against them, it isn't. Most of these engineers are not
bad in my experience, and some are really quite excellent. But they still
haven't seen enough of the patterns of business and development to have earned
the senior title. Senior people are the ones who keep you from making stupid
mistakes and identify known patterns and keep things on track and help you to
avoid wasting time. The senior engineer generally is the one that is going to
tell you to just use excel or buy a tool versus wasting time that doesn't
reach the end goal quicker.

For me, it isn't that these people aren't talented, but they are actually
doing themselves a disservice because when you tell me you are senior, I
expect a hell of a lot more out of you then just being able to write some code
or regurgitate some algorithm you learned in school.

