My Journey with a “Principal Team”
Alright, let me tell you about my time dealing with what some places call a “principal team.” Sounds important, right? Like the wise elders of the tech world. Well, sometimes they are, and sometimes, man, it’s a different story.
I remember this one place I worked. We had this group, officially titled the Principal Engineering Team. Their job, on paper, was to set the grand technical vision, guide us all, and make sure we were building stuff the “right” way. Seemed like a good idea at first. We were all chugging along, doing our projects, and then these guys would swoop in.
The process usually went something like this:
They’d spend weeks, maybe months, locked away in meetings. We’d hear whispers, rumors of “big changes” coming. Then, bam! A grand announcement. A new architecture, a new mandatory framework, a whole new way of doing things we’d been doing just fine.
Now, I’m all for improvement, don’t get me wrong. But it often felt like these decisions were made in a vacuum. We, the folks actually building the stuff, knee-deep in code and deadlines, we’d look at these grand plans and just scratch our heads. Sometimes the new tech was cool, sure, but it would mean derailing everything we were currently working on. Or it solved a problem none of us actually had, while ignoring the real fires we were fighting.
It felt like they were playing a different game. They were thinking about five years down the line, which is great, but we were trying to survive the next five weeks. And the “guidance” often came down as orders, not discussions. “This is the new way. Adapt.”
So, how do I know all this so vividly?
Well, I had a front-row seat to a classic example. We were working on this massive project, codenamed “Pathfinder.” It was a big deal for the company, lots of pressure. We had a solid plan, a tech stack everyone knew. We were making good progress.
Then the Principal Team got involved. They decided Pathfinder was the perfect opportunity to roll out their brand-new, company-wide microservices strategy, built on some cutting-edge (read: barely documented) platform they were all excited about. They’d read some papers, attended a conference, and were convinced this was THE future.
We tried to push back. We said, “Look, this is great for the next big thing, but Pathfinder is already in flight. Can we stick to the plan for this one and pilot your new stuff on something smaller?” Nope. It was an all-or-nothing decree. The argument was that if the most important project used it, everyone else would have to follow.
What followed was pure chaos. We spent more time fighting the new platform than building features. Productivity tanked. Deadlines slipped, then slipped again. Good engineers, frustrated beyond belief, started to leave. The team morale was just in the gutter. We were constantly in meetings trying to explain to the Principal Team why things were so slow, and they’d just tell us we weren’t “embracing the change” enough or “lacked the vision.”
Eventually, “Pathfinder” did launch, but it was a shadow of its intended self, massively delayed, and way over budget. And the fancy new platform? It caused so many headaches that bits of it were quietly rolled back over the next year. The Principal Team, well, they mostly talked about the “learnings” and moved on to their next grand idea.
It was after that whole mess that I started looking around. I just couldn’t deal with that kind of top-down, disconnected decision-making anymore. I needed a place where the people making the big calls actually understood the ground reality. Thankfully, I found one. It’s not perfect, nobody is, but at least here, when we talk about big technical shifts, the folks doing the work are actually part of the conversation from day one. It makes a world of difference, believe me.
