If you’re the first ‘principal’ engineer in your company of course you don’t know what you have to do to succeed. It can also go another way: during growth fro

If you’re the first ‘principal’ engineer in your company of course you don’t know what you have to do to succeed. It can also go another way: during growth from 1 or 2 people to a small team, at some point a company might start assigning titles to people whoe already know what they're doing. Just because, well, the board or newcomers feel like it's needed or just for clarity or desire to structure things. Which leads to funny situations like me going to look for definitions of what my job might be, finding out that is non-trivial because there are apparently no strict definitions of 'principal engineer' and 'architect' and 'senior developer' and 'developer vs engnineer' and so on. So I ended up 'principal software architect' or something like that, a title which hasn't come up in any conversation ever since nor changed what I do.