The whisper resolved: as of the January cycle, I’m a Principal Engineer. Ten years, near enough to the fortnight, from git reflog. The panel asked what I’d do with the role; I said “fewer things, harder to see” and watched the one principal on the panel smile. That’s the honest job description. A junior’s output is code; a senior’s is decisions; a staff’s is systems of decisions; a principal’s, near as I can tell from three weeks in, is the questions the org asks by default, the design-review prompts, the pre-mortem templates, the “who resigns over this?” that runs without me in the room. You know you’ve done principal work when something goes right two quarters later in a meeting you weren’t invited to. Compensation for the invisibility: this archive, which has been practicing exactly that accounting since 2013.
The year opens with the industry mid-correction: Amazon’s 18,000 layoffs announced this week, Salesforce’s 8,000, the trackers still counting. And Southwest’s meltdown got its postmortem hearings scheduled, the crew-scheduling system (reportedly decades old, long flagged by the pilots’ union, deferred through a decade of record buybacks) failed exactly as its warnings described: the Beirut clause (deferred maintenance is a choice with a blast radius), now with 16,700 cancelled flights and a Congress that suddenly understands technical debt. When the invoice arrives, it compounds.
The fortnight’s grace note, filed with the weight it deserves: Damar Hamlin, the Bills safety whose heart stopped on the field January 2nd, revived by instantaneous, rehearsed emergency response (the medical staff’s cardiac drill executed inside three minutes, on live television), is awake and recovering. The andon-cord doctrine, the rehearsal gospel: sometimes the practiced runbook gives you back a life. The league postponed the game without pretending anything else mattered. Correctly.
TIL, principal edition: the promotion packet was, for the third time, this blog with the jokes removed, but this time the panel had read some of it (the Proverbs file circulates further than I knew). Write things down. It remains the entire trick. Year eleven begins.