What a great writeup. A lot of it sounds very familiar to my experience as a principal engineer at Amazon. There’s a certain point at which you realize the hard

What a great writeup. A lot of it sounds very familiar to my experience as a principal engineer at Amazon. There’s a certain point at which you realize the hardest software engineering problems for a large company are social problems, and that’s what you devote most of your energy to as a PE (or, I guess, a Staff Engineer). Personally, I really didn’t have the stomach for the work, eventually; I have gone back to active programming, this time for scientific projects, and I am much happier.