I agree the original tweet is wrong. Imo as you become a more senior your role should become more and more tightly focused. Narrowing down into things that are

I agree the original tweet is wrong. Imo as you become a more senior your role should become more and more tightly focused. Narrowing down into things that are more important for the company. Examples might help here: As a junior dev you can be expected to fix bugs in the product, work on features, maybe help with testing. Basically anything that the company wants to get you more experience. This is the role discussed in the tweet filling in any small gaps. As an intermediate dev I would expect you to start working on your own features (with help from a senior+). Only when you're finished these you can tackle anything else like random bugs and suchlike. Senior dev is more about helping others so you mentor juniors, help intermediate devs with their features and are given the slightly harder features to work on. Principle devs shouldn't really be mentoring juniors. Certainly you can ask for advice but I would have all my principles working on the hardest parts of the codebase. Anything that requires research or things that the company hasn't done before. Examples of this would be adopting new technology, complex algorithms ...etc. Seniors go to you for advice, not mentoring or step by step by advice on how do I approach X or Y that sorted of thing. You should have a principle working on a low level bug (say a spelling mistake or poor grammar) that's for people further down. There's an element of people management here as well. Staff roles are mostly hand off and are their to take the strategic approach that comes from the exec team i.e. the CTO / CEO and actually puts them into action. So think working with product coming up with reasonable plans that are actually doable. You'll work with the principles to execute your actions. If it's a big system and a big team part of this will be working out how to split the work amongst the sub teams. This is what I mean by the responsibilities as you become more senior your responsibilities change from fixing spelling mistakes to help set and execute the roadmap of the product / service.