Also, I want to add a more positive anecdote to accompany some of the more negative ideas of principal engineers. I’m a senior software engineer (L5 in FAANG te

Also, I want to add a more positive anecdote to accompany some of the more negative ideas of principal engineers. I’m a senior software engineer (L5 in FAANG terms) and I’ve worked with a handful of principal engineers who have all been incredible colleagues. All the principal engineers I have worked with have been humble and ego-less engineers. There’s this notion that they just write docs but they’re invaluable code/spec/design reviewers, they have taken on major refactors to tackle tech debt that just lingered for years, and have generally unblocked me on so many occasions. The strongest principal engineers have never taken credit for massive projects they have orchestrated but “everyone knows” they’re valuable. It takes a lot of skill, and I’ve found they switch between the “archetypes” effortlessly. Beyond that, they’ve helped me grow in my career and find impactful projects that look good on perf reviews. In my mind, the good ones are definitely worth their cost.