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Re:What does a Principal Software Engineer do? by pradn on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @01:49PM (#29555626)
You hit the nail on the head. It was very different coming from Microsoft, where people's title and level (about one-two levels corresponded to a particular title) were visible in every chat dialog, to Google where you can edit your title to anything you want and levels can be seen only by going to a tool and looking it up specifically.
Re:What does a Principal Software Engineer do? by kelnos on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @06:41PM (#29559726)
When I started at Twilio, I set my title on whatever chat we were using to something silly like "Director of Naptime Initiatives". (Well, ok, when I started we just had a poorly-used internal IRC server, so I guess this was a bit later when we got HipChat or whatever.) Sadly, these days the title field on Slack is synced with Active Directory, which has the human-readable title name, plus the level number.

It's really dehumanizing. I think I'd rather not know people's titles, just what team they're on, and their role.

Re:What does a Principal Software Engineer do? by ghaff on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @02:41PM (#29556413)
At my current company, where I've been for over ten years, I've always just made up a title to match my current focus/what seemed "fresh." My original external title that was made up to hire me didn't actually make a lot of sense and differed from the internal HR title anyway.

Ended up doing something similar in my original tech job as well. I'm not sure I've ever really used my official HR title and would probably have to look it up to be sure I'm remembering it correctly.

Re:What does a Principal Software Engineer do? by zhengyi13 on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @04:52PM (#29558455)
I've personally set my title to "Shennanigans Regularly Effected".

Also, lots of folk deliberately opt out of level visibility, too.

Re:What does a Principal Software Engineer do? by pradn on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @05:54PM (#29559256)
I didn't know you could opt out of level visibility!