Apologies for having to abbreviate some words in the title to fit into the title character limit.
I've seen questions and discussions around here about what staff/principal/etc engineers do and why (leveling terminology varying by company), including a fair and understandable amount of skepticism of its value; I thought that perhaps this recounting of my work and experience in that sort of position could be interesting to some. I have never posted one of my publications on social media like this before so I am interested to see how it is received, to engage on relevant topics, and to field some of said skepticism.
This is a case study I submitted to and was published for the XP 2022 conference, catching up after the COVID period. It marks my "drop mic" moment of switching from software engineering to machine learning engineering after IBM shut down the office where I worked for close to 6 years. I do highly recommend that conference, by the way, and the experience report track has an intentionally low barrier to entry that I am more than happy to chat about / advocate for because I believe that conference attendance/speaking should be much more normalized in our profession than it seems to be. (Call for submissions for XP 2023 is open until Feb 12 and only requires an abstract!).
I've seen questions and discussions around here about what staff/principal/etc engineers do and why (leveling terminology varying by company), including a fair and understandable amount of skepticism of its value; I thought that perhaps this recounting of my work and experience in that sort of position could be interesting to some. I have never posted one of my publications on social media like this before so I am interested to see how it is received, to engage on relevant topics, and to field some of said skepticism.
This is a case study I submitted to and was published for the XP 2022 conference, catching up after the COVID period. It marks my "drop mic" moment of switching from software engineering to machine learning engineering after IBM shut down the office where I worked for close to 6 years. I do highly recommend that conference, by the way, and the experience report track has an intentionally low barrier to entry that I am more than happy to chat about / advocate for because I believe that conference attendance/speaking should be much more normalized in our profession than it seems to be. (Call for submissions for XP 2023 is open until Feb 12 and only requires an abstract!).