It's not just about the number of slots. It's also about the quality of people. There may be some jokers who are Principal Engineer at Google, but I never met

It's not just about the number of slots. It's also about the quality of people. There may be some jokers who are Principal Engineer at Google, but I never met any. In fact, I met plenty of great engineers who were "only" Staff. So my impression is that you have to be a really good engineer to make Principal. However, Google's management is below-average by the standard of large tech companies (how else do you explain its use of stack ranking?) and its product team isn't especially good either. I never met a Principal Engineer or higher of whom I knew I could do his job better than he could, whereas I met plenty of high-ranking managers and product people for whom that was obviously the case, and not just to me. The management ladder, at a tech company, is where you go when you get tired of competing against the best in a field, and prioritize high salary and title. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. People grow up, have families to feed, and take the big-fish/small-pond route. (At Google, that's product or management-- clearly not engineering, where there are plenty of very big fish.) Good for them. It's probably the right decision. It's hard as hell to justify, say, a $200k salary as an AI researcher when absolute badasses are content with $150k. It's much easier to go into the business mainstream where absolute jokers take $500k, by age 40, for granted.