[trhway]

>made principal like 5-6 years out of undergrad

looking at our (we're naturally not FAANG, not even close) dept recent big promotions around - a principal 6 year out of undergrad. No need for insane workloads, just great soft skills around high management people, and the lack of experience and knowledge just helps to always be in enthusiastic agreement with instead of questioning that high management's not smart, to say the least, decisions .

[rejectedandsad]

At Amazon, principal means you can direct organization wide technical strategy, implement the foundations and mentor others. It’s an insane bar internally.

[trhway]

in our case that specific person now owns all the aspects of a huge platform (~400 people), right next after the VP of our org (and being an engineer on a pet project of that VP is what resulted in such a career jump). The platform of course is just nowhere to be of any success - it is an unmanageable pile of modern sounding technologies (based on k8s of course; and you name any buzzword - we have it) done in our very "enterprisey" way - yet "we're making progress".

I actually was a principal at one mid-size a decade ago. I went there as an IC and was very clear about that, and they gave me the high level just to bring me in. Nevertheless the principal related crap - powerpointing/etc. - was creeping in, and after the first yearly vest i left, despite all the raises in the counter to keep me, for a normal senior engineer position at another place. 2 years later they tried to bring me back as a chief architect to build a new platform, and i almost went there as the project sounded great, just in the last moment right before accepting the offer i really remembered why i left - the technical work will be overwhelmed by the "organizational" work.