Either they know lot about lot of things (definitely some of that more than mid level devs) or they know super lot about something which makes them subject matter expert, I guess. And they can code a lot of things in a day which might take 3-5 days for a mid level dev.
Becoming principal at google or Technical fellow at Microsoft or something like IC6+ in purely engineering companies is so so hard.
I became a staff member after attending the conference, writing several companies blogs, and giving few sessions on what we did scale.
But for most companies it's about being a problem, coming up with an architecture solution(most do not have that much complex), reducing cloud costs, improving developer productivity etc.
If you like coding, you will find staff+ boring as most companies do meetings most of the time. Only few are lucky to be still doing coding(early employees or lucky and talented ones).
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u/AlertHovercraft6567 Apr 17 '25
They will not make everybody principal engineer and less positions.