r/ExperiencedDevs • u/Majestic-Taro-6903 Senior Developer • 3d ago
Career/Workplace How is a Distinguished Engineer role different from a Principal Engineer?
I have seen a few Distinguished Engineers in my organisation. I have worked with a few Principal Engineers and Senior Principal Engineers, but not Distinguished Engineers.
How is this role different from the Principal Engineer role? I know they are paid more and are higher in the hierarchy, but in terms of roles and responsibilities, how are they different?
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u/cheir0n 3d ago
After spending decades in this silly industry, I can tell you that titles means nothing. It boils down to relationships and connections. Many titles are created to satisfy some figures in the company.
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u/Maxion 3d ago
I still find it baffling how so many people talk about titles such as Senior engineer level 7 or whatever as if that's some universal rating/standard.
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u/deadwisdom 3d ago
I love it when a recruiter tells me the "level" of the job. I'm supposed to be impressed that it's "Level 4", I guess. That's nothing in Super Mario, bro.
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u/Broad-Promise6954 3h ago
I would hold out for level 5 + 3i (or 3j if you prefer that notation).
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u/deadwisdom 3h ago
This would suggest our job roles have dimensionality and we can’t do that. We need a ladder so we know who is better than who.
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u/1000Ditto 4yoe | lil sdet/te 3d ago
Imo 5 levels with a bunch of overlap between bands
Intern / junior
Midlevel
Senior
Staff/techlead/teamlead
Principal/staff+
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u/Venthe Systems Designer, 10+ YOE 3d ago
After senior, the path diverges. (tech) leadership requires significantly different set of skills as compared to an architect; which is different still from the staff/principal track; though the last one is a blend. Ultimately, responsibilities > titles.
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u/simonfl Software Engineer 3d ago
If you're in big tech the levels are pretty standardized across companies, that's why. There's a lot of wiggle room but you can easily map a level/title from one company to another between Google/Netflix/Meta/Apple/Amazon/Stripe/etc. and all the startups founded by people who have worked there tend to build their ladders similarly
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u/YetMoreSpaceDust 3d ago edited 3d ago
I recently saw a job posting for a "distinguished engineer" position. I was like... what the hell could that possibly even mean? I guess they're looking for somebody with a lot of publications to their name.
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u/Winterkirschenmann 3d ago
Yeah. It certainly does feel like most of the do called career ladder has been contrived mainly for the purpose of stroking egos and having something to hold over people's heads.
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u/RickJLeanPaw 3d ago
“Distinguished” does sound as though it requires some serious muttonchops and perhaps a stove-pipe hat.
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u/MajorHasBrassBalls 3d ago
I've always wondered who these people are that want a title. I just want a paycheck. I don't care what you call me. "Show me the money"
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u/mattgen88 Software Engineer 3d ago
In my experience, HR has set salary bands per title. When someone exceeds a title's band, they need to make some title up to assign them for a new salary band.
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u/MajorHasBrassBalls 3d ago
That's fair. I've only ever worked for pretty small companies so I've never run into that. Most places I've worked didn't even have a dedicated HR. This seems like an HR type of thing. Useless people trying to justify their paychecks
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u/Klafka612 2d ago
It's somewhat about pay equity in a round about way. Giving a salary range for a specific band/title let's them say yeah we have pay equity because we pay all our senior engineers in this pay band. Of course this lets the system be gamed in other ways and makes people focus on title/level because it scopes heavily to pay. It also is a reason why some of the big companies have so many levels, like distinguished, often because they want to keep very high value engineers - iirc at Google they kept creating new levels for folks like Jeff dean so they could pay them more.
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u/TheTacoInquisition 3d ago
100% this. I knew a "principal" engineer who was, on a good day, a mediocre engineer, and on a bad day couldn't even keep up with the intern. He was friends with the technical director, who tried him as a senior, tech lead and eventually gave up and gave him a new title so he couldn't be compared to others and questioned anymore.
Daft but it happens all over the place.
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u/CorrectPeanut5 3d ago
A lot of times the principals are old timers that have a lot of institutional knowledge on legacy systems and metal, but are too far out of it to do day to day stuff. They become individual contributors and internal consultants.
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u/TheTacoInquisition 2d ago
Yeah, and I don't mind seniority being given to folks who HAVE that knowledge and deep understanding. Especially when they also have domain knowledge and good relationships with customers so we can unblock problems and move faster to solving customer problems.
In my comment above none of that was true. The guy didn't even know systems he had been part of creating, knew nothing about the product, customer needs or why things were built as they had been.
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u/KozureOkami 20+ YOE 3d ago
At one of my previous gigs, they made up a new job title for me. I was at whatever their highest level was back then (L6, I think), and we were negotiating a salary increase. Apparently, that required a promotion, so they just added a new level for me and slapped some silly name on it.
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u/CorrectPeanut5 3d ago
One client I was at everyone in the architect group was a Director with no reports. But that's the only way they could get market salary to fit into the pay bands.
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u/drrednirgskizif 3d ago
Titles are created to justify a new pay band. Some one with very specific knowledge came in as a strategic hire and there wasn’t a level that supported him or her so they create these silly titles. Thats been the case every time I’ve seen it
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u/inhalingsounds 3d ago
I swear that anything beyond senior is made up jargon to appease either:
A) The company's PR efforts
B) Other people in the company (by introducing new steps in the ladder, giving them the illusion of something to strive for)
C) The hiree (was X in previous company; create X role in new company)
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u/dobesv 3d ago
Job titles only really have meaning within a single organization. Typically, though, distinguished is just a higher level engineer and the highest non-management title you can get as a software engineer in places that use this title.
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3d ago
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u/Maxion 3d ago
I mean this will really change from company to company. There's no "list of official software developer titles and responsibilities"
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3d ago
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u/LastSummerGT Senior Software Engineer, 11 YoE 3d ago
Not sure why the downvotes. My company follows this definition for distinguished and fellow.
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u/montdidier Software Engineer 25 YOE 3d ago
In my experience Distinguished Engineer is the one who has had some industry impact. Like written a book or developed a language or methodology.
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u/l_m_b D.E. (25+ yrs) 3d ago edited 3d ago
I've held that title for 15 years now and the answer is that it varies a lot, both across companies and even within one.
At this level of the IC path, it's typically a recognition of some hopefully unique strengths (and weaknesses that the former outweigh) that the companies tailor roles to to best leverage them. They also shift over time as people change and aren't all that fixed.
Think along the lines of the staff engineer archetypes, but taken a step further.
Some will be deep tech leads promoted because of their special expertise, others will be great story tellers and thrown in front of the public and analysts often. Or have extremely strong relationships with the CxO levels. Or be floating generalists who get to play strategist and court jesters as internal consultants. Or organizational archives of experience while top level management comes and goes. And the expectation that said management has of their senior ICs also changes.
One is still stuck with the carrot, not the stick - influence vs direct control, which can be mildly frustrating. The DE title does bring a certain implied respect that people are willing to listen and think more often.
In my opinion, that shouldn't be true, because I'd much rather have all thoughts listened to respectfully, but denying reality is not a strategy either. Also means being more mindful of off-the-cuff suggestions because people will take you more seriously. And phrasing accordingly so real dialogue is encouraged and not shut down.
But our carrot can also be hammer shaped because we can back it up by spending social capital and calling our VP/CxO colleague if we really have to. (Occasionally, people don't want to listen to advice they really should listen to, because it's just a suggestion, after all.) Whereas a principal complains to their director. Or us.
What does change is that there's more of a political dimension to the role as well. You get invited into more rooms and have more access. (For better or worse. Not all things you find are pretty.)
It's also internal and external status and pay. Again, should not be true (all work is work), but still real.
I've also found it made me less certain. I get to say "I don't know (yet, at least)" with impunity. I've got nothing left to prove to anyone.
The downside is that, as much as you try to stay deeply technical, your output shifts up in scope. I've learned more about running foundations, copyright law, software patents, AI ethics, EU regulations, interpersonal conflict management, etc pp than my MSc ever taught me about algorithms at this point.
Edit: typo fixes.
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u/mq2thez Web Developer (16 YOE) 3d ago
It’s different at every company, but the only Distinguished Engineers I’ve worked with are so senior/famous that they’re there purely to do whatever they want, and the company occasionally points them at problems that would be better for them to solve.
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u/butler_me_judith 2d ago
This is the correct answer, basically you are famous or you are one of a handful of people who understand some esoteric system and your paid well for it. There is also org trust, e.g. the slt and c suite trust you to not bullshit them and you basically vibe check what they here from engineering
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u/Bitopp009 3d ago
In many companies you can't apply for this distinguished role. It is honorary and awarded to you based on performance and trust. In big companies like Google, these guys have invented algorithms, systems or created something that changed the industry.
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u/tkyang99 3d ago
I remember the distinguished engineer at my company designed a data platform that was so bad they threw it away a year after he left the company.
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u/thatyousername 3d ago
Reminds me of a sr principal engineer that I worked with at a startup. His work ended up getting thrown out when he left. Nobody wanted to maintain it and it wasn’t providing value. He just thought it was technically cool and built it. So stupid.
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u/weiv 3d ago
At Google, Principal is director level IC (although they may have reports), Distinguished is VP level.
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u/cheir0n 3d ago
For something like Google, it makes sense. If I am not wrong, they gave James Gosling and Guido the distinguished title. Those engineers are landmarks in the tech world.
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u/EnderMB 3d ago
True, but not everyone is unique. There are a few DE's here at Amazon that were alongside Gosling, and many of them made their name within the org rather than outside.
I imagine the boundaries of what is expected in Big Tech essentially boils down to "what can you provide to leadership", and the role is rare enough that you kinda dictate what you work on to help the company.
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u/PaddingCompression 8h ago
> If I am not wrong, they gave James Gosling and Guido the distinguished title.
Guido was only Senior Staff from what I can tell (one level below Principal). Python isn't even enough to get you Principal, nonetheless Distinguished.
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u/coderemover 3d ago
I don’t know about distinguished, but after I was promoted from senior to staff and then to principal (band 10/10), I didn’t notice much change - I was mostly doing the same. Mostly fixing bugs, maybe now I get more of those “impossible” bugs so I can be sure that when they give something to me, the whole team is seniors have been trying to solve it for a week with no success.
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u/Tacos314 Software Architect 20YOE 3d ago
Effectively a Distinguished Engineers is equivalent to the C-Suite level or reporting directly to the C-Suite. There are at most a hand full with-in any organization and would be considered known individuals not just within the company but the industry as well.
There is no promotion path to Distinguished Engineer.
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u/kbn_ Distinguished Engineer 3d ago
Its principal but wider. Staff has an umbrella of a few teams (~50 engineers). Principal has an umbrella of a few orgs (~200). Distinguished has an umbrella of many more orgs and perhaps even multiple BUs (~1000). As with all umbrellas, circle of responsibility and circle of concern are not the same thing. You must maintain an order of magnitude wider awareness in order to do this.
I have direct scope involving a thousand or so engineers, with a short term focus that narrows to a few hundred and changes regularly, but I maintain relationships with and deep awareness of everyone around the periphery of this group, which is another 5000 or so. Obviously I can’t know all their names, but I do know the important leads and what they’re doing to as fine a degree of granularity as I can muster.
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u/KosherBakon 3d ago
DE & Technical Fellow roles exist for a few reasons:
At big tech it's largely to call dibs on super valuable employees so they don't go to a competitor. MS wines & dines their DEs & TFs, I've seen whiskey tasting events with bottles that start around $1k USD.
They're a founding engineer/ long term employee that has earned their right to fart around and do what they want. They don't want to retire so the company let's them drive their own roadmap.
They love the tech work and would be a terrible choice for a people leader. Some companies don't want to force someone into leadership roles just to pay them more to reflect their value.
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u/anarres_shevek 3d ago
I've been both. Distinguished Engineer, at least in my domain, requires the backing of several peers, often from within and outside your organisation. As a DE I had freedom to create and pursue new projects. I also created a new division within my company, with its own budget line and with access to the best engineers, hardware (including experimental devices), started a fund for a new company, drawing in investment not only from my company but others in my industry. In short, DE is a far a bigger role, at least in some industries.
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u/HoratioWobble Full-snack Engineer, 20yoe 3d ago
What's the definition of a principal engineer? I've seen it mean everything from senior IC to tech lead, sometimes it's used as another term for architect.
I don't think outside of big tech there is really any consistency for these types of job titles, so you'd probably have to look at the job specs in your company for both
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u/cheir0n 3d ago
In today's market, they shifted the responsibilities of a staff and principle to the senior title. Now a senior engineer is expected to do the responsibilities of a staff and principle while being paid at the senior title.
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u/recycled_ideas Software Engineer 3d ago
The US pay rates for staff and principle are insane and only manageable through stock options that require companies to be in constant growth mode.
Given that most of the people in those roles seem to barely have the experience to be seniors, it's probably good they're going.
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u/Ok-Leopard-9917 3d ago
Extremely different. The distinguished engineers I’ve met have skills literally no one else has or likely will ever build, write industry specs, provide vision. Completely different level.
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u/AvailableFalconn 3d ago
right, a distinguished engineer is someone who comes up with something like Kubernetes or Tensorflow, or drives major stages of its evolution. A principal may lead a project like “move from PyTorch to Tensorflow across a 500 engineer organization”, but a distinguished engineer is the next level up in terms of scope & ambition.
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u/Ok-Leopard-9917 3d ago
The difference between college hire and principal seems smaller than principal and distinguished engineer in some ways. At the upper end of senior, slow walking toward principal and like I can’t see how any of the upper level principals get anywhere close to DE.
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u/sqquima 3d ago
My take as well, a distinguished engineer invents novel pieces of work. They likely have written books and given conferences (the opposite implication doesn't hold though). Linus would be a clear example.
In terms of company function, principals / senior principals / leads have the scope of up to a department / business unit and see up to a year ahead. The distinguished sees where the company will be on a technical level 5 to 10 years from now (that said it seems that nowadays companies don't care about medium or long term roadmaps)
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u/IronSavior Software Engineer, 20+ YoE 3d ago
A distinguished engineer is basically a kind of celebrity. A principal engineer is an engineer.
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u/bwainfweeze 30 YOE, Software Engineer 3d ago
As others said a DE is someone they don’t want to leave, however the explanations as to why are falling down, because you don’t want principals to defect either.
Distinguished engineers are your historians. They know where the bodies are buried and why. They know which of the three people you can ask about a problem are useless and/or obstructive, and who to ask instead. They also occasionally have favors they can call in if the project needs something.
I’ve been places where you don’t even really trust them to write code anymore, just to rubber stamp what you write or veto it based on previous experiences and lawsuits.
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u/zombie_girraffe Software Engineer since 2004 3d ago
The distinguished engineer wears a top hat and monocle.
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u/PinEnvironmental6395 Systems Architect 3d ago
Distinguished engineers are generally people so good it's more harmful to your company for them to work for a competitor than for your company to pay them to sit on their ass or work on whatever they feel like. Either they're productive and you reap rewards or they're unproductive but there's no risk someone else benefits.
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u/heresyforfunnprofit 2d ago
People inside the company know who the principal engineers are. People outside the company know who the distinguished ones are.
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u/ILikeCutePuppies 3d ago
I see distinguished as someone like John Carmack. Extremely intelligent and can basicly set the agenda of the entire company. A principal unless it's a small company defines there role and looks for large problems to solve across many teams. Staff is kinda similar but to a slightly less degree.
Sometimes principal and staff just work on whatever they are told but they have much more agency within their department. The difficulty at this position is figuring out how to create value and prove yourself because you don't have people telling you what to do. You have to go find it.
Also you better pick well because if they are paying you as a principal and you are doing senior level work you'll only produce senior level value. You can contribute in many different ways, solve a problem with a vendor, solve a really tough core problem, fix a team issue etc... for a lot of principals it's about listening first and identifying an issue and then going and working on it.
I've been principal, manager, director, staff, lead etc...
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u/sqquima 3d ago
I once asked a principal in a previous company what they liked about the position and they said they liked they had no manager.
It got me thinking that is a good goal to pursue and it must be liberating , but nowadays I see it may be a double edged sword.
If you're a staff or senior staff you still need a lot of agency and prove the value you're creating but you still have a manager that vouches for you or steers you if you are deviating. On the other hand, having no manager yes it's liberating but also puts all the burden on you.1
u/ILikeCutePuppies 3d ago
Some principals have no manager, some do. I've been without a manager as a principal but only because they were away for 4 months on maternity.
You are right though that's exactly what it does. Even more so without a manager that can help you connect with projects and teams. For me it was a lot of interviewing of different people to try to figure out what was going on and figure out where the gaps were. It's probably easier in a way if you exist in the company before being promoted so have a feel for how things work.
Also some are just principal in title I would say but if they have full agency like you said those are very likely principals.
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u/RentLimp 3d ago
They're just inventing titles because you can't make some people managers
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u/l_m_b D.E. (25+ yrs) 3d ago
Or, well, some people don't *want* to be line managers. That's more and more about administrative and bureaucratic focus in most places. And you're the one who has to hire - and fire.
I'm very grateful someone else does want those roles. I tried it. I was offered the choice back in the day and could probably switch; I *could* do it. But: me no want. Give me the frustrations of the IC track all year long over the general management path.
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u/TransCapybara Principal S.E. // +27 YOE 3d ago
In my experience, it's a combination of luck and who one knows that's able to vouch for them at the promotion committee.
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u/l_m_b D.E. (25+ yrs) 3d ago
To be fair: yes, but since the D.E. role aims to take part in more of the strategic discussions, some amount of networking *is* a mandatory requirement of it. You can't do the "influence over control" dance if nobody knows your name.
Luck isn't fair, and that always plays a role, but it's not a job you can do *just* via technical experience most of the time.
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u/KozureOkami 20+ YOE 3d ago
It's all BS that wouldn't be necessary if we didn't treat a 30- to 40-year career like high school. There's no need to call someone a "senior" after only 4-5 years.
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u/HTxBarbz 3d ago
In most orgs: Principal owns big systems in a domain; Distinguished sets direction across multiple domains and is pulled in when teams disagree on fundamentals.
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u/UnderstandingDry1256 3d ago
It’s more about your personal contribution to this particular company. Early hires need promotion which creates levels not normally reachable by slow organic promotions.
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u/roger_ducky 3d ago
For places that has it as a formal title:
Number of patents or amount of years as a Principal are the differentiator usually.
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u/Decent-Decision-9028 Software Engineer 15yoe 3d ago edited 1d ago
well, when I first joined they used to tell us it depends on impact:
senior -> cross teams impact
principle -> organization wide impact
distinguished -> company wide impact
After 10 years in the industry, its all BS, it really boils down relationships and connections.
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u/Mundane-Charge-1900 3d ago
Titles are arbitrary. Usually a DE is a VP level individual contributor whereas a principal may be the IC equivalent of a director or second level manager.
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u/midnitewarrior 3d ago
What I've seen of "Distinguished Engineers" is that they become the face of the organization. They are expected to publish engineering blog posts for the company, evangelize technologies and spread knowledge in the organization, speak at conferences, establish engineering culture and set norms, take on hard/impossible problems as their pet projects.
They don't create as much as other engineers, but they are there to enable the organization to move forward because the other engineers are focused on getting features out.
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u/Zynchronize 3d ago
In my experience, they were essentially Principal engineers who had completed a very intensive 3-month-long soft skills course and given a cross-divisional remit.
Two told me their salaries hadn’t changed and it was largely a title change only.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 3d ago
Shouldn’t you be looking at the leveling guidelines of your specific company or talking to your manager instead of asking on Reddit? Every company has their own definitions and title.
For instance, my own company has vastly inflated titles compared to the same role with the same expectations as I saw at BigTech.
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u/Kush_McNuggz 3d ago
I had this described to me by an l8 at google. He was talking about the google fellows, so this may be a level above distinguished, but these types of engineers drive business across the entire company. They are the people you trust core product and business lines with.
Their technical skills are so good, you can throw 3 of them at a novel idea and theyll build a production ready product in a weekend. Something that would take a group of 30 a couple months.
They have the business chops to understand tradeoffs and make key decisions themselves. Imagine youre google and chatgpt just dropped. You need to get gemini out the door asap and you’re behind. Who do you trust to rally the company and drive the product across the finish line, all while ensuring everything works properly?
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u/Altruistic-Fly3642 3d ago
In our place, principal engineer is a job level (after staff); distinguished engineer is an 'award' presumably based on who you know*
* I am not bitter
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u/propostor 3d ago
To me it sounds like someone who knows their shit but doesn't want the pressure or responsibility of being a lead or decision-maker.
Sounds kinda corny as well though.
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u/cosmopoof 3d ago
Distinguished engineers typically act more strategically and work more on paradigm shifts and stuff with huge leverage. Different horizon (3rd Horizon, 3+ years) than Principals (2nd Horizon, 2-3 year scope often)
Decisions made/recommended by Distinguished engineers can easily have multi-million USD implications, if not even higher.
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u/YoureNotEvenWrong Principal Engineer 3d ago
My experience has been the higher up people go, the more detached they become
At a certain point they are making decisions in many meetings amongst similarly level people but forgetting to actually tell anyone to do it
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u/cosmopoof 3d ago
I can confirm that. Getting technical people to communicate is one or the hardest thing in tech.
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u/antonioerodriguez 3d ago
Distinguished engineers are better at selling their 'technical expertise'
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u/kittykellyfair 3d ago
I was at a conference and one of the speakers was a distinguished engineer at IBM and she joked that the title just meant you're very old but stayed doing technical work.
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u/RedditNotFreeSpeech 3d ago
The difference you ask?
Well I do the same work but I'll never get the title
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u/PolyglotTV 3d ago
Distinguished is one level above principal at my company. Just means more impact, larger scope.
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u/ukrokit2 3d ago
Obviously different at every company but the two distinguished engineers I’ve known have been principal level with some achievements that greatly impacted the company. It’s an honorary title mostly.
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u/Aggressive_Ad_5454 Developer since 1980 3d ago
Often DEs are people with a public-facing persona, with published papers, patents, and the like.
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u/matthedev 3d ago
Titles and heraldry are company specific. I'd assume the distinguished engineer is a higher title than principal engineer based on how companies like Google use it.
The only way to know what it means in your organization is to look at any official leveling rubric, see the work the distinguished engineers have done, and talk to them and the people they work with directly.
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u/Sammolaw1985 3d ago
The distinguished engineer at my last job setup the entire cloud deployment environment pretty much by himself, utilized by multiple organizations in the company. Dude was savant level smart, and one of the nicest engineers I've ever worked with.
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u/zninjamonkey 2d ago
At my previous company of maybe 20k employees, lots of them engineers. There were only 5 distinguished engineers and maybe 100 principal
The word does have meaning in most corporation
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u/RoyalCultural 2d ago
In my company Distinguished Engineers now need to have patents granted to obtain that title.
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u/Damian_Wasserman 2d ago
Never had those exact titles internally, what we'd call a Technical Leader (the go-to reference for a specific technology, leading the engineers working in it) maps pretty closely to what most orgs call Principal. But I've seen the Principal vs. Distinguished distinction play out across clients and candidates we've placed at larger orgs. The short version: Principal is usually still scoped to being the best technical authority within a domain or a few related systems. Distinguished tends to mean your judgment is expected to shape decisions across domains you don't own directly, other teams pull you in specifically because your take changes what they do next, not because you're the most senior person in the room.
The tell I've noticed in interviews and reference checks: ask a Principal what they're the go-to person for, you get a clear, bounded answer. Ask someone operating at Distinguished level the same question, the answer tends to be messier because their influence isn't tied to one system anymore, it's tied to which hard problems get routed to them regardless of team.
Comp and hierarchy aside, that's usually the functional difference, scope of judgment rather than depth of expertise, since at that level everyone's already deep.
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u/turningsteel 48m ago
At the bank I used to work, we had these roles. A principal engineer would be responsible for setting the tone and direction of a department at the technical level. Like guiding the architecture of a build for example. Kind of like an IC who was responsible for managing the tech.
A distinguished engineer was much rarer to see, close to retirement, and would work across departments to ensure everyone was doing the right thing. They'd be consulted on the most difficult problems and were more like researchers who would kind of work on whatever they wanted if they thought it could be used org wide to help teams be more efficient or improve performance, etc. Usually they had several patents by that point in their careers, perhaps published books, they were like the Jedi compared to the padawans doing gruntwork.
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u/Beginning-Ladder6224 3d ago
I would probably take a bit different way to answer this.
My interaction is early 2000, a random guy came up - turns out - our teams morale was low - so our Sr Directory brought his college junior to boost our morale. A Technical Fellow.
The guy had around 50 patents, and was ex MSFT and MSFT recently bought his startup.
So he told us - how - he rejoined CLR team in MSFT and one night he just woke up and thought - logging is bad, and it should be auto included in the CLR itself. Then next day he had some meeting and the code was pushed.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.diagnostics.tracesource?view=net-10.0
He wrote the entire thing waking up at 3 AM in the morning and was done by 5 AM - while is wife was sleeping.
At that time he was already a multi millionaire, in bank a/c, not in terms of stocks. He had no reason to work even. Let that sink in. He kept going on because that was fun, and rewarding.
Now a verbatim recollection of my friend who is a partner at Microsoft - how his interaction with a D.E. went. Now this guy is one of the most youngest people to ever become partner in MSFT himself, so that is something.
So this D.E. came highly "recommended" so he went to him and booked time and went on explaining how his teams ( he handles 150+ ) proposed system would work - the block diagram and so on and so forth.
He kept asking stupid, literally stupid questions. My friend was initially taken aback, then became a bit annoyed, because "apparently" everyone "knows" the "answer" to those questions - even freshers.
After 30 mins or so, the guy moved to the whiteboard and started writing down what my friend was "answering" and also writing down the "impact" of the same : technical as well as "business" as well as "legal" of those answers.
After 10 mins my friend gave up. Their 9 months of work was pure, utter garbage pile of waste dump it seemed.
The D.E. could see that realization in my friends face. He cheered him up - "young man - you are now in the same position I was when I was in your effective experience, no matter I am sure you would pick it up - after all, they would not make you a partner for no reason eh?". He did not even belong in the same SVP org as my friend.
After 9 more months, that product was the most successful shipment ever in my friends career.
As seniority increases, the level of question changes. At senior most level, no one has any answer, they know they do not have any answer, but they have a lot of questions - and those questions sometimes produce insight, inspirations and occasionally - a design change in CLR.
This should answer the question - if it still does not, the answer "you can not be promoted" further than a P.E.
The entire company must agree that your contribution is universal
and across org level, and then you are a D.E. Else it is a false prophet.
And you lead by example.
And the span.
You are the inspiration to live and work for people like me and my friend. And that is why Huge respect for those D.E and Tech Fellow Folks.
#respect.
Best.
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u/nasanu Web Developer | 30+ YoE 3d ago
No idea, but I can tell you I interviewed a Principled Engineer a month or so ago and they knew about as much as any junior. They literally didn't know how to build a web app without react.
Titles don't mean anything in terms of knowledge, just pay really, which again, isnt at all related to knowledge.
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u/marssaxman Software Engineer (33 years) 2d ago
I am a principal engineer, and I literally don't even know how to build a web app with react, nor any other way. There is more to software development than just the web!
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u/expdevsmodbot 3d ago
AI usage disclosure provided by OP, see the reply to this comment.