Principal Software Engineer has two different meanings depending upon your corner of the industry... at big tech companies (and those that adhere to their prece

Principal Software Engineer has two different meanings depending upon your corner of the industry... at big tech companies (and those that adhere to their precepts) it means you're one of a handful of top technical ICs that makes org-wide decisions. In more traditional "IT" jobs it means that somebody half a world away in HR decided that anybody not a manager is a Principal fill-in-the-blank with Junior or Senior possibly tacked on the front. It's been my experience that people aren't aware of this distinction and I would imagine that this skews the job title/salary graph. Case in point: I was a Principal Technical Specialist - Software Engineer long before I was a Senior Software Engineer. Guess which job was better-paying and required a higher level of technical acumen...