| > senior principal engineer you're telling me there's a difference between a principal and a senior principal? this seems like title bloat (non-financial, meaningless compensation) i think there are just way too many senior engineers and not enough work for them. this title thing feeds into my hypothesis: if you're getting to the principal level and then encouraged towards "senior principal" level, that's an illusion of career progress. i think more senior engineers expect to carry the sort of intellectual freedom they had as high output juniors forever as they become "organizationally woke elite hackers". that's just not a good way to portray yourself, though: eager juniors like that person once was will do the job at 75% cost, and not try to occasionally wade into politics as this free roamer has empowered herself to (ref. bullet about cross-organizational lubricant type) i would be extremely wary of portraying myself as an "elite hacker with enough confidence to meddle across teams" because that is about as vanilla as it could be in 2019. instead i would slot in with an enterprising managerial type and basically become his code peon, pumping out his prototypes, giving him the credit where due, and understanding that he's generating the ideas but not the code, so he can't ghost you very easily and (maybe) he'll keep you safe in the event of layoffs. this keeps you learning new tech and always building, but makes you really valuable to someone with organizational power, so safer than some generic engineer on a larger team. |