How to be a Principal Engineer/Senior Principal Engineer/Senior Architect/fancy-sounding-title Engineer, a thread:
1. You're evaluated on how much more the company succeeds because you're there, not the lines of code you wrote. If you can unblock someone, do that. If you need to kill a two year project that's not going anywhere, do that. Do what is right, not what makes you look good.
2. Your job is the strategy stuff and the dirty work stuff. All the cool stuff in the middle is for everyone else. You're not too senior to carry a pager or respond to outages, this keeps you in touch with how things are going.
3. If you get too caught up in the day-to-day (the how) to step back and think about whether you're going in the right direction (the why and the what) the team will eventually go adrift and people will lose motivation. You have to proactively own this.
4. Engineers are often bad at strategy because it involves unknowns and engineers like to be confident and exact. Getting good at long term strategy and dealing with unknowns is the #1 skill to develop:
medium.com/@jamesacowling…
5. If you spend all day in your little strategy bubble you will probably not have the credibility from the wider engineering team, and if you don't have credibility it's hard to get things done. It helps a lot to have spent serious time at the company building things and continuing to do so.
6. You're on the solutions team, not the complaining team. If you don't like something then go fix it or go speak to someone about getting it fixed. Sometimes you also just need to let things go.
You also need empathy for company leadership. They are probably not a bunch of idiots, they're likely just juggling a different set of priorities. If they really are idiots then quit and go work for a better company.
7. Pick your battles. Not every engineering decision needs to be perfect. Sometimes people need to make small mistakes and learn from them. Sometimes you were wrong and it wasn't a mistake after all. Holding people accountable is way better than micromanaging them.
8. You have to make choices! Choices are decisions where there is no single correct obvious outcome. You have to do it and then you have to own it when it's not perfect. This is usually better than doing nothing.
9. Don't try to hide behind data driven decision making. Sometimes there's just no data to support what has to be an intuitive decision. Just because it's measurable doesn't mean it's the most important factor. Use data to reflect on the decision afterwards and learn from it.
10. Do your best to be made redundant. Mentor folks, try to help people grow, give junior engineers the maximum autonomy and responsibility they can handle. Once someone else can do your job then you can go take on bigger challenges.
11. Don't be an asshole. The tech industry is small and everyone knows the people they trust and who they'd want to work with again. This is the iterative prisoner's dilemma and the optimal strategy (career wise and as a human being) is just to be a good person and try to do the right thing.
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