Why "Normal" Engineers Are the Key to Great Teams - IEEE Spectrum

“When people talk about world-class engineering organizations, they often have in mind teams that are top-heavy with staff and principal engineers, or that recruit heavily from the ranks of former Big Tech employees and top universities. But I would argue that a truly great engineering org is one where you don’t have to be one of the “best” or most pedigreed engineers to have a lot of impact on the business. I think it’s actually the other way around. A truly great engineering organization is one where perfectly normal, workaday software engineers, with decent skills and an ordinary amount of expertise, can consistently move fast, ship code, respond to users, understand the systems they’ve built, and move the business forward a little bit more, day by day, week by week.”

Why "Normal" Engineers Are the Key to Great Teams - IEEE Spectrum

“When people talk about world-class engineering organizations, they often have in mind teams that are top-heavy with staff and principal engineers, or that recruit heavily from the ranks of former Big Tech employees and top universities. But I would argue that a truly great engineering org is one where you don’t have to be one of the “best” or most pedigreed engineers to have a lot of impact on the business. I think it’s actually the other way around. A truly great engineering organization is one where perfectly normal, workaday software engineers, with decent skills and an ordinary amount of expertise, can consistently move fast, ship code, respond to users, understand the systems they’ve built, and move the business forward a little bit more, day by day, week by week.”

https://spectrum.ieee.org/10x-engineer

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it's really easy to do your job when there's no principal engineer trying to extract a promotion out of you