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by version_five 1861 days ago
> There’s an outage on a Sunday morning. A huge Slack thread starts. Devops and devs on call manage to fix the issue. Principal engineer gets involved ACKing other’s people comments, adding thumbs up emojis, and at the end says “Big thank you to all the people involved” (plus a rocket emoji)

Just want to call out how accurate this is. The last place I worked was full of this kind of person (as managers, wecdid not have a principal title), and the description, right down to the emojis is bang on!
2 comments
sokoloff 1861 days ago
If I had such a principal on my team, I’d be happy about that. It means that they’ve contributed to an overall team dynamic where the team does not depend on them personally to perform under pressure.

Far worse is a team of on-call juniors who stand around jabbering cluelessly until someone decides to call in Principal Pat who fixes it in 15 minutes during the 7th hour of outage.

If the team is on the right track, providing non-technical support and encouragement is exactly what a principal/director should be doing, to reinforce that the team is performing and earns the credit.

The principal “owns” the annual downtime and problem-loss figures. The team gets credit for this weekend’s fix.

In other words: “A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” —-Lao Tzu

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_y5hn 1861 days ago
Not a "Principal", but you guys would rather be followed up by a business person who would come up with their revised requirements and timelines, each day or the other? Or obey the commands of the technological genius that somehow always have the answer to every question, for others to implement exactly as told?

Leading by using technological experience and refraining from prescribing "the meds" all the time, is lighter work, so one can stretch over much more than otherwise. But nobody becomes master of everything, and those places that have those, truly suck without knowing it. Having to go into all the depths, someone else'll need to take point..

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