[yodsanklai]

Within a given company, I think these roles are well-defined. In a big tech company, a principal engineer will influence decisions at a much higher level then a senior whose isn't visible outside his team. And an engineering manager support, evaluate, represent the team, and help with goal alignements.

[nixon_why69]

Maximally cynical take, tongue somewhat in cheek:

If we measure principal engineers by "cross team force multiplier impact and its visibility to management" (second part being key), what kind of behaviors do we incentivize? Are there, possibly, bunches of mid-level and senior engineers dealing with extra hassles to demonstrate this impact?

[jpgvm]

Sort of?

My journey up from Senior/Staff was mostly on the back of proposing and then leading cross-functional projects.

Which means I was doing Principal work before being granted the title. To be honest it was (and remains) a huge amount of work and I wouldn't continue doing it if the recognition and compensation hadn't been forthcoming in the following perf reviews.

If you are doing this stuff and aren't moving up where you are then you should be going somewhere else as that is probably a very exploitive work relationship.

[nixon_why69]

It sounds like you were one of the actual Principal Engineers, then. In my experience, there are some who had presumably done some of that in the past but now had to maintain their position by generating "cross-team impact" which was mostly just a PITA to actual practitioners.

One case in particular, there was a re-org and the new org lacked principals but we had a common vision and a bunch of pieces in place. We needed a new vision that was led by the new principal, for obvious reasons. Whole thing was set back by a couple years while this was figured out. The existing, well-functioning pieces (with lots of users) were shipped to India teams for maintenance while the org slowly figured out facsimile pieces.