Kosmik
Honorary Master
Lol sorry, it's Saturday and I've actually been reading about Kafka recently, being spammed by tons of ebooks. I get what you mean
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Principal Engineer
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Hamster
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So a principle engineer is not bounded by the bounded contexts of the distributed event driven architecture.
I hate the software industry. Whatever terms or fancy words will they come up with next... can't wait.
Kosmik
Honorary Master
It's quite ridiculous and the companies are always trying to re-invent themselves ( devs also not being great fans of environmental change). Then there's adhearance to structure vs intent, it's becoming a very murky landscape.
TBH, most older devs I know don't really concern themselves much with titles, far more about the work and abilities. The industry has had to grow over the years and the evolution of technology, not just stacks but also the facets and new fields as well, raises complications few could envision.
I don't put much weight in titles. I rather look at the job responsibilities.
What a Principal Engineer does for our business:
- Has a relentless focus on understanding customer need and delivering customer value for customers. (sales, business analyst)
- De-risks the organisation by bringing greater stability to technical solutions and platforms. (IT manager, risk manager)
- Shares knowledge and builds a pipeline of specialists. (manager, HR)
- Collaborates to bring new technologies into the organisation to solve business issues faster, in a scalable cost- effective way. (Architect, Agile methodology, change control, project manager )
- Understands the product lifecycle, from conception to end-of-life, from supporting a product in the field to creating something that can be grown and adapted as requirements change. (Architect, Product manager, Maintenance)
- Inspires and spends time developing others, to make them far better at their job than they were before. (HR)
- Understands which business levers trigger change, and guides others through managing stakeholders and navigating politics. (Business Strategy, Politician)
- Solves non-functional issues like observability, automated testing and scaling. (Devops, Hardware, Software)
Sounds more Absa want to shift all responsibility onto one guy. Rather let people specialize like in R&D. The end result would be much better. With those responsibilities listed you are just going to create a person who has to wear too many hats.
I know what I would tell them to do with that title.
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The job description says it's an executive level position.
I suspect in this case the person hired by Absa will just hire a bunch of people to do the work for them and just end up like any other executive. Attend meetings, network, play politics and buy the latest Merc.
That reminds me. I once worked at one of the big 4 consulting firms. The database lady got promoted to executive level but because you need to be a CA to be called partner there, she had to settle for the title of technical director.
She was all about the title and didn't manage people. Didn't even want to be near them so got an office in another building. The result was chaos.
Hamster
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That would be ABSA's version of it, yes.
Some companies call people senior developers after 6 years of experience, others look at capability.
Some call themselves Solution Architects because they can slap together a MySQL database, a CRUD app on top of it and deploy to cPanel all by themselves, other Solution Architects are drawing up diagrams and engaging with business stakeholders.
...and some don't care if they are called Lead Shitwrangler as long as you pay them for partly coding, leading a team on one project, being a tech lead/lead dev on another...whatever.
Titles are all bullshit except within the organisation where they are defined.
Kosmik
Honorary Master
Utter truth, don't look for a standard, every company has differant expectations, folks need to make sure they know what they are in for, an interview is a two way street, use it to ask questions.
I don't think that taking on all responsibility for all aspects of the above is necessarily what is meant. I literally do all of the above where I work, along with hand-on technical work. By this, I don't mean that I take the sole responsibility for all of these, or that I necessarily work on each of these aspects every day, or even every week, however, on an as-needed bases, I rotate my attention to all of the above to weigh in as a key member of the technical staff. We have people dedicated to each of the above of course, however, for the bigger decisions, they generally lack the context and cross-organizational experience.
In terms of the title itself - yeah, it really can mean many things. Case in point: The US firms typically have many levels above "Senior": staff, senior staff, principal, senior principal, distinguished, senior distinguished, fellow and senior fellow. Some companies only us a subset of these, and inter-company, they tend to mean things that are somewhat different.
The salient point, however, is that in all cases it is an attempt to elevate engineering talent to an executive level position (parallel with senior managers, directors, VPs, etc.), in order to get this type of skill set optimally involved in the organizational decision processes (vs being easily overridden by management), and to get technical talent to drive the technical direction of the company.
I believe that the above is far healthier for any company dependent on technology. It also provides a career path that doesn't equate managing more people as career (and hence compensation) progression, allowing companies to retain their talent.
The salient point, however, is that in all cases it is an attempt to elevate engineering talent to an executive level position (parallel with senior managers, directors, VPs, etc.), in order to get this type of skill set optimally involved in the organizational decision processes (vs being easily overridden by management), and to get technical talent to drive the technical direction of the company.
I believe that the above is far healthier for any company dependent on technology. It also provides a career path that doesn't equate managing more people as career (and hence compensation) progression, allowing companies to retain their talent.
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TEXTILE GUY
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What I see in this the Open Innovation type business modelling and BMC iterations.
Today, in many industries, the logic that supports an internally oriented, centralized approach to research and development (R&D) has become obsolete. Useful knowledge has become widespread and ideas must be used with alacrity. Such factors create a new logic of open innovation that embraces external ideas and knowledge in conjunction with internal R&D. This change offers novel ways to create value. However, companies must still perform the difficult and arduous work necessary to convert promising research results into products and services that satisfy customers’ needs. Innovators must integrate their ideas, expertise and skills with those of others outside the organization to deliver the result to the marketplace, using the most effective means possible. In short, firms that can harness outside ideas to advance their own businesses while leveraging their internal ideas outside their current operations will likely thrive in this new era of open innovation.
Open Innovation :: Open Innovation Community
Open innovation has been variously described as a process, a set of interfirm relationships, and a cognitive paradigm. As originally explained by Henry Chesbrough: Open Innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and...openinnovation.net
Hamster
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It is a good step forward. At the company I currently work for the next "title step up" from senior developer are either architect, tech lead or team lead.
Kinda feels like there's a gap from a title point of view and to be honest, I always thought of "tech lead" more as a capability/role than an actual title.
phoneJunky
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In a company I worked for Principal Engineer was just a tier for your seniority/responsibily.
Junior Engineer -> Engineer -> Senior Engineer->Principal Engineer->Specialist Engineer
To move up you needed to show a certain responsibility to move to the next tier.
So you could still be a Senior Engineer and worry about the life cycle etc, because you were the system engineer on the project.
I would guess that this is more for the specific field, but Principal Engineers have been used in SA a lot and it didn't mean this. Maybe it doesn't even mean the same thing across companies.
Junior Engineer -> Engineer -> Senior Engineer->Principal Engineer->Specialist Engineer
To move up you needed to show a certain responsibility to move to the next tier.
So you could still be a Senior Engineer and worry about the life cycle etc, because you were the system engineer on the project.
I would guess that this is more for the specific field, but Principal Engineers have been used in SA a lot and it didn't mean this. Maybe it doesn't even mean the same thing across companies.
Yeah, the problem with “lead” is that it implies that that person’s responsibilities are still essentially the same as the team mandate.
Where I used to work, some principal engineers would report to a director rather than “manager” level management, and distinguished engineers would typically report to a VP or SVP.
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