Advice for New Principal Tech ICs (I.e., Notes to Myself)

Summary

What makes an effective principal engineer or scientist? Here, I’ve distilled what I’ve observed from role models and quoted some of their advice below. While my perspective is naturally Amazon-centric, these ideas should also apply to most principal tech IC roles. As always, use your best judgment and assess if this advice applies to you and your situation. • • • 1. Different principals will have different flavors. Some dive deep in one space while others excel at horizontal influence. Some are technical trailblazers who show how things are done, while others clarify complexity and illuminate the path forward. Still others are masters at aligning multiple orgs towards a common vision. No one flavor is more important than the other, and you need to find the flavor that plays to your strengths. “Amazon very specifically says they want their principals hands on. Any principal who’s not being hands-on for an extended period of time (okay in short bursts) is likely setting themselves up for failure.” 2. The work that was core, and made you successful in your previous role, is now the side task. At this level, writing the code yourself may not be the best use of your time. While you should still be writing code (to stay connected to the work), your core role is now technical vision, design feedback, sponsorship, providing business, product, and technical context, finding new problems, connecting the dots, etc. “This is a well-known saying for L7+ roles. It is not saying that you should spend less time coding, but that even if you are still coding 80% of the time, the most impactful part of your role is how to make everyone more effective. The mindset shifts from focusing solely on coding for a single project or perfecting on your own to influencing how all builders can build better across projects. This can be through contributing high-quality code to the repository and letting the code speak for itself, but also through other efforts—arguably more effective—such as givi...