Staff/principal level here. I accelerate my team. Sometimes that involves writing code, sometimes that involves teaching/mentoring others, sometimes it means improving our tools and processes, sometimes it involves hammer out our architecture and security approach, and sometimes it involves figuring out what baroque process I need to go through in order to get legal’s approval to launch our new product. I make sure almost all of what I do is well documented and communicated to the rest of my team.
The three rough metrics I’ve heard for how staff/principals are evaluated are “creating clarity”, “impact”, and “leadership.” Those metrics are all very difficult to perform on if I were focused on my code related output as an individual, although there are people who make and achieve within that level in my company who do more straight up coding then I do. The important thing is good judgement on where to spend your time to have the most impact.
If you wanted me to put numbers on it, I’d say my time is probably 25% coding, 20% meetings, 20% working on infrastructure and tools, 20% documenting/communicating, and 15% mentoring/recruiting.
this is a great summary, and pretty much exactly reflects my role. My job is to help other engineers in our org be as productive as possible. That always means trying to include other people in what I'm doing from a mentor/career-development perspective, but otherwise follows your % splits pretty well.
The bits that people don't talk about frequently are things like "what do you actually do in the 20% of the time you are coding?" It's usually things like performance analyses and optimizations, solving misc tech debt that I have the flexibility to work on since my time isn't allocated to project teams/squads, architecture and PoC work for new capabilities we think we will need, and honestly sometimes its just picking up a couple super low level tasks anyone could do because keeping team members focused on other things is what's most important.
At least in my org the common theme is almost always "there's a hard problem over there, go help them fix it'.
Source: principal engineer for a couple years, senior for 6 or 7 years before that. Not at a FAANG, but in a ~350 person technology org at a company with nationwide offices and consumer product presence in the USA.
The three rough metrics I’ve heard for how staff/principals are evaluated are “creating clarity”, “impact”, and “leadership.” Those metrics are all very difficult to perform on if I were focused on my code related output as an individual, although there are people who make and achieve within that level in my company who do more straight up coding then I do. The important thing is good judgement on where to spend your time to have the most impact.
If you wanted me to put numbers on it, I’d say my time is probably 25% coding, 20% meetings, 20% working on infrastructure and tools, 20% documenting/communicating, and 15% mentoring/recruiting.