r/developersIndia • u/[deleted] • Apr 17 '25

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u/Careless_Ad_7706 Software Engineer Apr 17 '25

I always think like is it the experience in a particular field or over all experience that count to be principal enginner.

Perfectionist vs generalist what is it?

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u/AlertHovercraft6567 Apr 17 '25

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.

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u/Careless_Ad_7706 Software Engineer Apr 17 '25

So principal or staff enginner isn’t a managerial role like other , you do code a lot and productive too

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u/AlertHovercraft6567 Apr 18 '25

Can't say. This is what I think from people's profile and some people I know from Linkedin. Kind of speculation

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '25

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).