Do companies hire principal and staff level engineers from job postings?

> only advertise positions for people who are comically well-decorated; Principal engineers with 10 years of experience, plus the masters degree, plus a bunch of specific cloud orchestration, scalable systems, or other devops experience that just seems entirely impractical to accumulate without simply advancing at the same company or FAANG for 15 years, which seems itself to be an unachievable tenure in this millennium.

You don’t need to spend 15 years at the same company or at FAANG to acquire these skills.

One issue that a lot of people face is that their career has been less about accumulating 10-15 years of progressively more complex experience and more about accumulating 1-2 years of experience 7-10 different times. It can take some deliberate planning to work your way upward over time and across companies rather than repeating the same arc over and over again.

Another trap is when people who want to be high-level ICs end up in management for a while, slowly getting further and further from working on the tech.

In this job market it’s hard to go from unemployed in one country to direct hire Principal in another country unless you have an extraordinary skill set. It will make more sense to get your foot in the door at any job that might work, then move up from there.

IMHO, the very specific requirements with no wiggle room, especially if they have very specific requests for how to apply are likely in support of immigration requirements. For some immigration processes, the hiring company needs to show that there were no qualified domestic candidates despite doing a search.

If it's a lot of things with this or that, and the submission isn't send postal mail to this address with this reference etc etc, maybe it's just picky recriting.

Yes, but the market is particularly bad now.

I have 15+ YoE, and currently working at FAANG. I've spent the last few years leading a team of engineers to deliver one of the top priority projects of my org with estimated impact of +$100M ARR, and I have been consistently rated high performer. I also have some niches skills that are particularly on demand these days. I am not actively looking, but I am open to hear from recruiters. Due to my situation, I only entertain Staff+ roles or equivalent.

Recently a well known company (not big tech) reached out for a Staff role. After the initial screening, the recruiter came back to me saying that they could loop me for a senior role, because my experience doesn't match the expectations of a Staff role.

I honestly don't know what to make of this exchange. Is the market unreasonably tough these days or are my expectations too high?

In some companies, staff positions can only be effectively done by someone who has been there for 10 years. They know the specific tech stack that the company uses, know the application, know where the bodies are buried, and everyone in the company trusts them. It's basically impossible for someone to parachute in and do the job.

Yes, I’ve hired for such senior level roles though a job posting or recruiter. I haven’t kept track, but I’d guesstimate that over my career it’s been 1/3 each of promotions, references, and hiring from some kind of advertising/recruiting.

Just a single data point and a personal opinion, take with a grain of salt.

The companies do hire principal and staff levels from such postings (as well as from other channels). But even more important, many companies are open to hire at a different level. They create a single posting (e.g., to avoid HR hassles) and if the person they like is at a different level they will adjust it in parallel with sending an offer. So unless it is clear that the company only needs principal level hires I would send a resume there as well.

For example, HR might give the hiring manager a single slot and insists on having a specific level in the posting. What this often leads to is the hiring manager aims as high as HR lets him (usually easier to hire at a lower level than approved than at the higher level). Those 2-3 levels might end up as a union of all requirements and skill lists can get ridiculous. Bottom line -- if the company is interesting and your skills are relevant I would apply.

The market today is not great. Many companies overhired during zero interest and covid stimulus times and are now reverting to the mean. IMO it will get worse before it gets better as unprofitable companies run out of money. So I would focus on areas where there should be less competition: secondary metros (not bay area); larger, profitable companies (expand beyond software-specific companies); hybrid or on-site jobs (fully remote are especially competitive now); etc.

If you apply, apply well: have a few polished resumes and, if needed a good cover letter (no need to be super company-specific; put company name, copy-paste 2-3 main relevant points from your database of snippets and let ChatGPT fix the style). Good luck!

The tech job market is the worst I've seen since the dotcom bust. What makes it worse is that hiring has been really incredible the previous 10 years, so there's an entire generation of tech workers that have no idea what a "normal" or "bad" job market is like.

My advice is assume there are 1000 people applying for the same job as you, and you need to tailor every single resume for the job. If it says "Staff" just go for it and don't downplay your experience. Give it your best and let THEM be the one that tells you you're not qualified. Make it your job to study and be so well prepared that they can't tell if you are qualified or not.

I'm assuming that the job market will be bad like this for another 2-3 years so buckle up.

I was. I started as a staff IC at FANG after replying to a posting on the public careers website.

Don't assume every job listing is just for a single open position. For more junior positions, there may be several vacancies.

> a bunch of specific cloud orchestration, scalable systems, or other devops experience that just seems entirely impractical to accumulate without simply advancing at the same company or FAANG for 15 years, which seems itself to be an unachievable tenure in this millennium

all of these skills are also achievable within a couple years by being a relatively trusted engineer at a startup

nothing is more heart-pounding than the first time you push an update to 100 thousand people, with no guardrails but the ones you yourself have installed

People keep mentioning roles, such as Staff, Staff+, Principle as if they are standardized. Can someone point to a reference where these are defined in a standard way?

More years of experience do not equal staff engineer. The terminal position for most is some sort of senior engineer level.

It might be helpful to consider the manager equivalent which is like a high level director or low level vp.

In part it is helpful as the role has some similarities in that it involves influence. It’s a more difficult position perhaps, since the influence required comes without the same power. The highest level roles can include influence outside the organization as well.

I didn't get the jobs but I've gone through interviews for staff jobs and know others that have too.

For the edit, idk if anyone reads cover letters, but I bring it up with the recruiter durring the initial call that staff mignt be a reach for me and it it doesn't work out lower levels would be ok

Yes, people at staff+ level are routinely hired. But these are typically very senior positions and you are expected to be in some way transformative. Staff engineers are roughly equivalent seniority to a manager of 6-12 people and should bring significant domain expertise. Principal is an end-career role a small fraction of people reach after 30 years in the industry. They’re roughly equivalent to a director, who in the FAANG model leads 50-500 people.

It’s not surprising that the requirements are very high. These roles exist to fill a specific business need.

Caveat: this all applies to FAANG and adjacent. Other industries use different titles, but the use of the word “staff” usually indicates that you’ve adapted the Google career ladder.

I wouldn't worry about crazy requirements; they aren't hard and fast. There have been hilarious examples of this. DHH, the creator of Rails, once posted about a job posting asking for ten years of Rails experience when at the time Rails was something like nine years old, meaning he was the only person on the planet qualified for the job.

Job postings are often run through HR, who typically lack enough context for the role to know what they truly need. They put in the usual language and pad the requirements. Think about what the real role is, and OBJECTIVELY ask yourself if you could do that job. For example, someone with three years of hard-core React is probably what they really need when they say they want someone with 15 years of Javascript.

Yes they do. One of my current search jobs (no pun intended) on LinkedIn is "staff engineer", two of the others being "architect", and "consultant".

And while the amount of jobs on that level is - understandably - a lot smaller than lets say "senior software engineer" they still pop up because while there is a enormous demand on the junior/senior level (and quite some supply) highly skilled people who can perform on beyond that are extremely scarce while there is quite some demand due to a ever expanding IT market.

At least especially here in Northern Europe, YMMV.

I think they want the same thing they do at lower levels - prestigious school degrees, and without that, it's a total crap shoot.

yes, have hired for both from posting roles (900 person engineering team at a public company)

I was never a "Principal Software Engineer" until two years ago. Both hires were from an online job posting, one on the company site itself. Both jobs were government contract companies but salaried roles. And salary is it, no stock or end of year bonus. Both paid about half of what a MAANGA job would pay for the same role, but still far more than other similar remote roles, and a bit better than the senior software engineer roles.

I've also applied to all the standard tech companies over the years, but have never once received an interview. I don't really blame them, I'm not some stellar candidate, but I still do it just in case I get lucky. I've had colleagues who couldn't debug a program to save their life (I know because I did it for them) making several times my pay now at the name brand techbro places. I also know some very good devs I worked with at these companies too. I can't say there is anything different about them on average than anyone anywhere else I've worked, so don't give up if you really want to work there. One guy I know finally made it in after nine years of not getting in, and is getting a huge salary, and major recognition for his work, and promotions, so it can happen, just like winning the lottery happens.

Outside the super-compensated roles there often are a dearth of people applying with both 10+ years experience AND competence in the requested tech stack. That being said, the interviews are totally a crap shot. I've had ones where I aced every question and they passed on me. I've had others where I didn't know a lot of what they wanted but they were sufficiently impressed to give me an offer.

Stop thinking about actual ability to do anything and start seeing it for what it is, a game, or better yet, a gamble. You just keep rolling the dice and hope something lands.

For myself, in the current environment over the past two years it's been taking 6+ months of looking constantly doing 1+ hours of applications and interviews daily before I received one or more offers. No cover letter, but spending money on recruiters reviewing and recommending changes to my resume, and applying like a madman at literally thousands of positions on job boards and directly with the company. Have gotten ghosted, gone through five rounds only to not receive an offer, all the normal stuff you hear about.

Generally I've been receiving maybe one or two HR callbacks for every hundred or two hundred applications. Of those HR callbacks maybe half I make it past the tech screening to the first interview. Another half or less I get to a final round. So all in all I've been doing a few hundred applications over several months for a single offer.

If I was really desperate, which I was in the past dotcom and 2008 crash, I would take one of the horrible W2 contract roles that pay barely above McDonalds wages. I've had these sustain me from going homeless for up to a year before I could get something more in line with a regular salaried job at more typical engineer pay. But I'd take those jobs in a heartbeat if I had no other job lined up.

Note I just went to state school with a bachelors, have no top tech companies in my record, am well over 40, and haven't really achieved anything other than getting back up on my feet after getting repeatedly knocked over by downsizing and offshoring.

Good luck, and don't give up. If the Irish can achieve independence after 800 years of subjugation, it's a reminder even in a tech down economy we can find our place in the sun too.