Principal Engineer Staff Engineer Distinguished Engineer (my favourite) I’m going to say it and it’s likely a little rhetorical: I dislike all these terms immensely. Please can someone give me the canonical description for what they are supposed to mean? (I know I can use a search engine or AI to do it… I want to know what people think they mean). The industry I work in is in danger of disappearing up its own backside. What’s wrong with: Software engineer Why do we need to differentiate? The only reason I can see is signposting to people with differing levels of experience or different sets of responsibilities. If we need to do that then, I’m not sure our teams are set up correctly in the first place. #software #softwareengineering #softwaredevelopment #productdevelopment
>Please can someone give me the canonical description for what they are supposed to mean? They determine the scope of your work, your duties and responsibilities, expectations, and impact. In the long-term, they are a testimony of your capabilities. The same reason there is a “Lead” in your current role :) Work environments are complicated. What does being just a software engineer mean? How do you qualify one’s ability to step outside the mere technical field and take up bigger challenges involving keeping parties aligned, fostering communication, coaching technically, managing people’s quirks, managing speed and stability of software products? Is your idea that a graduate software engineer should earn as much as a 30-year-old-of-experience distinguished?
I think you can just call them software engineers with levels, it really doesn't matter. I'm not sure there can be a canonical description, but the principal should typically create impact across projects, i.e. your principal devops might be the person driving your common hosting solution architecture. The common alternative is a seperate architecture team, which have suffered a significantly worse episode of disappearing up its own arse, because they've largely stopped being technical long ago. They'll spend most of their time talking to vendors and basically deliver nothing tangible. Thus, the point of these titles is a stake in the ground that we still expect you to be technical, and it's worked a whole bunch better for the companies that coined the terms.
In a word: Psychology 1. Attracting talent 2. Retaining talent 3. Motivating talent 4. Inspiring talent 5. Defining the bars for talent 6. Elevating the capabilities for an entire organization of talent, by formally establishing the minimum threshold definition of skills, per level.
It's for career growth right? The words don't matter, but individual contributors need a place to grow beyond senior engineer, and senior senior engineer or very senior engineer lost out to staff engineer.
Your title is “lead software engineer.”
Leveling is central to: - assigning role and scope - managing expectations - compensation strategies It’s a quick and easy heuristic for targeting the right folks to engage for <your concern here>. And it helps folks to plan their career paths. Many of us like the granularity for those reasons. There are employers who use very flat leveling, so if that’s something you care deeply about, perhaps seek those out for your career needs.
My answer can be found here: https://www.junaideffendi.com/p/why-job-titles-matter
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6moScope of impact is how i’ve always known it. Junior = Self Mid = Small Group Senior = Team Staff = Group of Teams (Domain) Principal = Group of Domains (Technology) Distinguished = Business/Industry e.g. Creates innovation and new ways of using technology (languages/frameworks/libraries etc) to give a business leverage and a competitive advantage by solving problems previously unsolved.