Michael's Workbench

This is an over-simplified analogy I use to explain the difference between IC (individual contributor) levels in engineering jobs:

Imagine there’s a book that describes everything we do and how we do it.

Junior Engineer: Bought the book, started reading it.

Engineer: Read the book, understands and can apply most of it.

Senior Engineer: Knows the book through and through, understands and can apply all of it.

Staff Engineer: Routinely explains the most difficult parts of the book to others.

Senior Staff Engineer: Knows and does things that aren’t in the book (remember, the book describes “everything we do”).

Principal Engineer: Wrote the book.

Senior Principal Engineer: This is the person to whom the Principal Engineer dedicated the book.

As you can see, it is highly oversimplified. However, time has shown that it falls into the category of “if it’s stupid, but it works, it’s not stupid.” I came up with this analogy more than fifteen years ago when I started having regular conversations with engineers on my team about what it would take to get them promoted to the next level. I quickly found that there was a general lack of understanding of what each title meant, other than “It’s one level higher than mine, and I want it.” So, this analogy became a good way to start the conversation, explain why someone is at their current level, and then explore what will get them to the next one. After 15+ years of using it, I’m finally writing it down to share.

This is never meant to replace actual level expectations – those should have multiple dimensions (e.g., scope, technical competence, communication/collaboration, autonomy, initiative, etc.), each dimension should have a detailed explanation of what each level looks like – and these are generally very job-specific.

Also, the names of the levels came from where I worked at the time – Genesys. In other companies, I have seen slight variations in level names, but the number of levels is usually similar, plus/minus one, and their general meaning is the same.