Companies that need to keep their software developers around long-term often introduce a (notionally) parallel career track with titles like "Senior Principle SDE L8"

I don't think it's just "notional". These people are usually put in technical charge of progressively bigger / more complex projects. They have a lot of clout, decision power, but not organizational/disciplinary powers, no direct reports.

Alternatively, I've seen a "senior principal" dev working effectively as IC in a technically very demanding project (specialized database engine).

I'm a 'principal SRE' which is a weird thing. More made up than the rest of the titles out there, at least. It exists in the void created by others, eliminating toil and such.

Basically champion firefighter in addition to what you describe. Arguably the role we'd have if there were many CTOs and they were still practicing, instead of getting showtime

> Companies that need to keep their software developers around long-term

I never get why companies are so fixated on salaries being tied to titles. People just do different jobs and you shouldn't need technical or people leadership to get paid more.

If someone is really effective at their job they don't need to be called (or do the work of) a principal engineer. Just pay the 10x engineer 10x.

Generally speaking, there are hard, concrete pay bands associated with roles. As you progress through the pay bands there's less room for raises. There isn't an idea of "an exception" to this rule. There aren't special employees in the rank and file.

More frustratingly, for example quasi-governmental places, the total comp raise any individual can receive is a hard limit written in their rules. Even if you skipped 5 levels you couldn't even get that raise. That's why new employees are hired at a higher rate than existing employees. The only solution is to quit for a time and then come back to the org. Though maybe once every 5 years they'll do a realignment of pay bands.

What’s a 10x engineer and how do you measure that?

> and how do you measure that?

That's on a company's performance reviews... and so how do you measure salary increases, bonuses, anything? There shouldn't be a different standard to it.

The only difference is the engineer shouldn't be forced into a different field to get paid more.

> What’s a 10x engineer

It's just an expression I'd say. Can be 2x, 5x, whatever. Most of the time a good engineer is forced into management of some sort (technical or people) before the 2x mark (salary wise).

Having worked in such companies, you basically end up as architect, or senior team lead, where management like tasks still take place.

You end up doing less coding, more mentoring, drawing diagrams or doing requirements analysis with the team output customers.

Yeah, that's exactly my experience. After switching from managing to a senior (L7) IC position at Google, most of what this article mentions continued to apply to my work.

Not in software companies from what I have seen. They usually have a lot of steps after "senior developer"

> They usually have a lot of steps after "senior developer"

They're also not the same roles. Usually roles (except fake titles) above senior are a completely different beast just as well. Staff / principal replaces things like architect, system designer and other positions we had in the past.

That's a good observation. The career ladder also scales with the size of the company. I've seen many smaller shops where the ladder ends with a "lead dev" who is also usually some kind of mixed role (not purely technically) - project/team/product lead.

Whether you're very left wing and want to lean on "elite theory" or more economically minded and want to call them "principal agent problems", it seems hard to avoid some employees having a lot of power in a larger company, and if some employees have a lot of power it's easy to see them using that power to them make their own jobs unfairly well paid.