Most of those engineers, outside of ones who have extremely specialized knowledge or skills, are essentially managing others still just without a direct reporting chain.
The commit log for most of these high-level engineers is extremely sparse. They're spending most of their time writing documents or influencing orgs, not writing code.
Yes. I was responding to the sentence "With no directs, even “principal” would be a stretch in any company of note." which talked about direct reports.
The commit log for most of these high-level engineers is extremely sparse. They're spending most of their time writing documents or influencing orgs, not writing code.