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If this CTO has those objectives, why doesn’t he make them transparent? It should be clear for everybody what is expected in the next progression and part of th

by yayr 8y ago

If this CTO has those objectives, why doesn’t he make them transparent? It should be clear for everybody what is expected in the next progression and part of the organizational performance management process

bb88 8y ago
It depends upon the need for the role. In my experience principal engineers do one of three things. 1. Develop new technology that can be sold to customers with a wide understanding of the company's business model (engineer + salesperson) This would be different than an application engineer, because the application engineer uses the company's current tech to solve issues. 2. Fix problems in a multi-disciplinary technical pipeline (engineer + manager). 3. Develop new technologies that save engineering or business time on large scale. This could be creating a new process, or a new toolchain for a problem specific domain. It could also be optimizing or re-architecting a very large code base. (engineer ^ 2) So yeah while moving Jira's from left to right is a good skill to have. The first two require more soft skills, sure, but the last one is really writing more jiras, and communicating to other engineers how to solve a problem. So even it is not free of soft skills.
tootie 8y ago
In my org, principal dev is expressly for the most talented devs who don't aspire to leadership roles. We have explicit leadership roles that require certain personality traits more than technical chops.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  Like being able to deal with a thousand people dropping tasks on their desk and expecting them to get done.
  - tootie 8y ago
    No, we don't work that way. Devs are assigned to projects and projects have prioritized backlogs. There's always a next task and everything else gets in line.