In some companies this role distinction wouldn’t make sense, for new companies or companies without a lot of legacy systems, or small companies.Ī good software company won’t have a single person responsible in charge, you will have a good mixture of standards and rules coupled with a democracy and a to steal Jay Krep’s definition (principal developer at Linkedin), a mixture of capitalism and communism. This isn’t true at my company, aside from the fact I am one of two principal developers, we also have the older-style software Architect role and not a single dictator in charge. The overlord of the technology department You won’t get very far in software development if you consider yourself to be aloof to the rest of the developers out there as there are so many intelligent programmers - you can create an Ayende type coding machine role in an ivory tower (not to be confused with a coding machine for out-of-work personal projects of course) - but ultimately the hive mind is a lot more powerful in software development than a single one and you also make far more mistakes with the solo-coder attitude. Apart from displaying an unattractive amount of hubris, this is also not true. I can’t argue with this, I am quite awesome. Some of the alternatives might have been:
With a mixture of stage fright and not being able to provide a single one-sentence answer, I copped out with “It’s complicated, we do lots of things”.
I recently got asked this question at an internal (non-technology-based) event with about 50 people in the room. Or to word it another way, What is a Principal Developer?
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