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> To me, in a way, it reads like Principal IC is the worst possible job. It depends on the person, I think. Personally, I often end up doing this sort of work, particularly in smaller companies. I really like it, but appreciate that the vast, vast majority of people I work with would hate it. For some people, they prefer to lead through influence, rather than through a reporting line. There's a lot of toil in managing people (well), and some really excellent people don't like the core job of management, but are really really strong in some technical area, or have a broad enough perspective and enough personality to convince other people to do stuff. In some ways, it's the software engineering world's PM, given that you have influence but not direct hierarchical power, and what matters is the amount of teams that you can influence (like sometimes this is through a piece of software, designing and building Airflow was this kind of work). |
You worked in the design of Airflow? We're heavy users at my current company.