Best Big Tech Company for Principal Engineers - YouTube

First of all, a big shout out to  Jacobkurien for suggesting this video!

Principal engineer is a great  role for software engineers. 

I spent the last 15 years being a principal  engineer at four different companies,  

Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle. If you're going to be a principal engineer,  

and if you're going to do it for  a while, chances are good that  

you too will move between different companies. In that case, you probably want to know which is  

the best company to be a principal engineer  at, and how do they compare to each other.

Hi! I'm John Miller, the Deliberate Engineer. I've been working in industry for about 30 years,  

and I spent 15 of those as a principal  engineer at a variety of different companies. 

I spent about 10 years as a  principal engineer at Microsoft. 

A year and a half as the equivalent at Google. 

About a year and a half as a  principal engineer at Amazon. 

And finally, I spent a little over a  year as a principal engineer at Oracle.

During my time at these different  companies, I got to see how things are done,  

and got a better understanding of what  it means to be a principal engineer. 

I should make a couple notes  before we go any further. 

The first is this principal level engineer. 

When I say principal engineer, I'm talking  about that role at Microsoft and Amazon. 

There's a different name for  it at Google, "Staff Engineer". 

And at Oracle, I believe it's a  "Consulting Member of Technical Staff".

Even though I'm saying "principal engineer",  

think whatever position is relevant for  the company that you're talking about.

I should add one more note about the  time that I spent working at Oracle. 

Oracle created a cloud v2 group some  time ago in Seattle, based off of a  

lot of people hired in the Seattle area. It was a very different culture from the rest  

of Oracle, and a very different profile  in terms of the type of people hired. 

In general, people were extremely senior there. When I'm talking about my experience at Oracle,  

I'm talking about it in the cloud v2 group. That may be different from Oracle at large.

I've made a few other videos  about being a principal engineer. 

The first one is how you go about becoming  a principal engineer if you're a senior  

software engineer, and what the position entails. The second video is about being a principal  

engineer at Amazon in particular, and the many  great things about the role at that company. 

So, you might want to check out  one of those videos as well.

For the rest of this VIDEO we're going to compare  being a principal engineer at the different  

companies across a variety of axes. These axes are in alphabetical order. 

Autonomy - this you can also think of this as  your agency, how much control you have over  

the work that you're doing. Which groups and  which people you're dealing with, and so on. 

Breadth - the number of different people  and different roles that you work with  

in your role as a principal engineer. Coding - the amount of coding or programming that  

you do as your primary responsibility for the job. Peer/Mentor - how well set up the company is  

to give you peers to help you improve  in your role, and also mentors to help  

you learn what it means to succeed as  a principal engineer at that company. 

And finally, Prestige - the  

amount of prestige that the principal engineer  gets just for having that role the company. 

You can also think of it as the amount of swagger  you have in your day-to-day life at the company.

Autonomy is how self-directed you  are, and how much control you have  

over the type of work you're doing, and  where you're doing it at the company. 

The place where I felt the most control  over what I was doing was actually Amazon. 

One of the reasons for this was because  of the relative scarcity of principal  

engineers in the Digital Division, where I worked. I was a principal engineer for approximately 400  

other engineers, just because there were  so few principal engineers to go around. 

Another thing that gave me a great feeling of  agency was the fact that principal engineers are  

actively organized into a community at Amazon. In other words, you're encouraged to go talk  

to other principal engineers,  go to off-sites with them,  

and really learn what the other folks are doing. You have this overall community, which I haven't  

found anywhere else, that really makes it a  comfortable place to be a principal engineer.

Compare Amazon to Google, Microsoft, and  Oracle, and it's a very different feeling. 

Unlike the relative scarcity of principal  engineers at Amazon, at the other companies  

they were more like one in ten engineers. In other words, you tended to be embedded in  

a single group, and there were other principal  engineers in the other groups around you. 

So you didn't need to stretch  and work with those other teams. 

In fact, it was a little harder  to work with those other teams,  

because they already had all the  principal engineer time that they needed.

The place where being a principal engineer  probably counted for the least was at Oracle. 

Again, bear in mind that I  was in the cloud v2 group. 

But when I joined there, rather than being 1 in  10 or 1 in 50 or 100, in terms of my seniority,  

I was in the minority. I was one of the less  

experienced people out of that lab. I had 25 years of experience,  

and most of the people were senior to me.

In terms of breadth, my  experience was about the same. 

Which is to say, that I had a lot more breadth  

at Amazon than I did at the  other places that I worked. 

Now at Amazon, I could be working in a variety of  different disciplines, and a variety of different  

teams on any given day of the week. It was really nice to see. 

I could be designing protocols, giving  advice on how to set up an internet service. 

I could be looking at security. I could be digging into  

the client code on a kindle. All kinds of different things!

The breadth of things that I worked on,  

and the diversity of people that I  worked with was really astonishing.

Microsoft was probably the second best out  of these sets of places, in terms of breadth. 

I was assigned to a particular team, but that  team had influence over a lot of other teams,  

and so we wound up collaborating with  people in different organizations,  

or very far away in the same organization. There was a variety of different work to do. 

So not only the things having to do with the  component I was working on, but also data mining,  

analyzing the way the system as a whole worked. And at one point, even digging into  

stuff all the way up and down the stack. So that was a very nice thing about Microsoft.

At Google and Oracle, on the other hand, it really  didn't feel like there was a lot of breadth to it. 

I felt more like a member  of just the team I was on. 

You know, a single engineer,  the same as everybody else. 

There's nothing wrong with that, but if you're  looking to do a lot of different things,  

or have impact on a lot of different areas,  

I would say Google and Oracle are a little harder  to accomplish that than Amazon and Microsoft.

Coding is a really interesting  dimension for principal engineers. 

There are PEs who get hired just  to do coding at any company. 

On the other hand, a typical PE will code  usually with less than 20 percent of their time. 

When I was at amazon, I was  there for, let's say, 75 weeks. 

Out of that, I did maybe six  or eight weeks of coding. 

And that was done in two small bursts, rather than  being spread along the whole time I was there. 

There could be months that I  didn't get to do any coding. 

And I saw a similar thing as  some of the other companies. 

However, there's two companies that really  expected their principal engineers to be  

delivering code as the  primary thing they were doing. 

That was Google and Oracle. 

So, if you're looking for coding as one of the  primary things you do as a principal engineer,  

Google or Oracle out of these four. Otherwise, you can take a look at Amazon  

or Microsoft. And if you want to  

be doing coding, make sure that they're looking  for somebody who's going to have their primary  

contribution be coding before you accept a  job at those places as a principal engineer.

Peering and Mentoring. 

By this, I mean you having  peers, and you being mentored. 

Not the mentoring that every principal engineer  does for the engineers more junior to themselves. 

Now, at Amazon, that was probably the best  environment for both peering and mentoring. 

The PE community really made you feel included. Gave you a chance to find out how other people  

were doing, and to do a better job  of level-setting your contributions. 

Likewise, for mentoring, when I  joined as a principal engineer,  

they assigned two more senior principal engineers  who followed up on me regularly to make sure that  

I knew what to do, that I felt like I was  being useful, and all kinds of other things. 

Really a great experience from the  perspective of being mentored to grow.

The second best place was probably Google. At google, as a staff engineer I also  

felt like they made an effort to get you  mentored and to help you be more productive. 

Now in my case, I was struggling a little  

bit anyways, so I didn't get the  full benefit of the experience. 

But, it was part of the onboarding and the process  that they follow there, and so that's good.

At Microsoft and at Oracle, not so much. You know, as a principal engineer,  

you went there, and you were just supposed  to know what you were going to do. 

You could meet other people at your level, but  because being a principal engineer wasn't such  

a big deal at those companies, there  wasn't any sort of formal community,  

and really you didn't get any  mentoring about how to grow. 

Or at least I didn't get any mentoring, other  than talking to my boss and getting the normal  

mentoring any employee gets from their boss about  what they need to do to reach the next level.

Finally, prestige or swagger. Again, Amazon is a place where,  

if you want to feel special as an engineer,  it makes a lot of sense to go there. 

As a principal engineer, the engineering  community on average there is much younger  

and more junior than it is at  the other big tech companies. 

This means that coming in as a senior  engineer or principal engineer,  

you really have things to tell people they  haven't heard before (that they need to hear). 

So, there's a lot to be said for that. And, it's built into the process as well, where  

the people have to talk to to principal engineers  at a couple times during the product life cycle. 

For example design complete, its  final principal engineer review. 

And this makes them understand what you're doing  and appreciate the contributions you can make,  

which again helps you feel like  you're really being useful.

At Microsoft and Oracle, I really did  feel like being a principal engineer,  

it's just another job title in the job ladder. Sure, maybe you were, you know, better technically  

or you had more experience technically  than some of the people who are junior. 

And so they say "wow, I  want to be able to do that." 

But there is no mystique, nothing  special about being a principal. 

It's just one more job title.

A place where it probably meant even less than  it does at those other companies is Google. 

Not because they don't value seniority, but  because they've hired so many great senior people. 

They actually have several more technical  levels above principal (staff) engineer. 

More than the other companies have. So that when you move from staff  

engineer to senior staff engineer and then  to principal engineer, that's a completely  

different sort of set of responsibilities than  a principal engineer has at any other company.

So again, when I say principal engineer at  Google, what I really mean is STAFF engineer. 

That's the same as principal  engineer other places. 

Since they have so many really talented people,  

they're probably a little less impressed  with somebody who's just a staff engineer.

So, in summary, there's good and bad things  about working at all the technical companies. 

I still think Amazon is probably the best place as  a principal engineer, to have a really good time,  

and feel the freedom to grow, and to be valued. But the fact is, for all these companies,  

in a principal engineering role  there's a lot of great things about it. 

You'll get to do marvelous things technically.  Your work will be valued. You will earn good  

money. So it's hard to go wrong with any of them. But if you want to be coding with the majority  

of your time, maybe you should be  tending more towards Oracle or Google. 

And if you want to be making broader  contributions, or you want to have  

a real agency in terms of what you work on,  well, Amazon's probably the best choice for that.

I'd like to hear your experience, especially  if you're a principal engineer or higher. 

Do the things that I'm saying,  do they match your experience? 

Do you have experience from other  companies where you're a principal  

engineer that you could contribute so  that other people can learn from that? 

Please leave a comment down below. I'd love to hear what you have to say!

Also, if you found this video useful or  entertaining, it'd be great if you could give  

it a thumbs up and think about subscribing,  so you can see the other content I produce.

Thanks for making it this far,  and keep on pushing forward!