>But the team got the credit for being on top of things as a whole, not me. As it should be.
>If only! 70% of the work I do is invisible small course corrections here and there across multiple orgs that fix things no one ever hears about but would be disasters down the road.
>For the vast majority of what I do other people get 100% of the credit and my name is a small footnote at best.
Then your case is the exception, not the rule. To reach the level of principal, you generally have to be recognized for delivering high impact. Visibility is not just ego, it is how organizations perceive value. If your work earns you no visible credit, then no one really knows what you contribute. And if no one knows, how could anyone justify promoting you in the first place.
That is the ideal. In the ideal world, principals are elevated because they have a visible history of making the system better. They build frameworks that others rely on. They turn chaos into structure. They guide teams through impossible projects. Their reputation is not something they chase, it forms naturally from the wake of their work. In the ideal, visibility is the residue of real impact. People talk about them because their fingerprints are on every success.
But the corporate world rarely functions on ideals. In the real world, power accrues to whoever is closest to power. Titles often flow through social gravity more than technical merit. Some people climb because they deliver, others because they simply survive long enough to become unmovable. The higher you go, the more politics matters and the less evidence is required. Impact becomes subjective. Influence becomes reputation. And reputation, once earned, decays slowly.
In that reality, being invisible is not a liability. It can be a strategy. A principal who keeps their head down, avoids controversy, and stays on friendly terms with the right directors can outlast a dozen brilliant but abrasive engineers. The irrelevant survive because they are not a threat to anyone’s ego. The company quietly carries them, paying tribute to their title while forgetting their function.
Even the ideal, though, cannot escape the need for visibility. A principal who does great work in secret still fails the fundamental requirement of leadership: to be seen. Influence requires perception. You cannot guide a culture if nobody knows you are there. Quiet impact might keep systems healthy, but it does not create belief, and belief is what organizations promote. The best engineers learn to make their results legible. They translate their impact into stories others can tell. Without that, the work disappears into the background noise of everyone else’s effort.
So there are really two systems running in parallel. The first is the ideal, where promotion is earned through visible excellence and quiet authority. It demands both impact and awareness. The second is the reality, where promotion is often granted through time served, connections maintained, and an ability to avoid friction. The ideal rewards contribution; the reality rewards endurance.
You can succeed in either system, but they ask for different currencies. The ideal asks for mastery, courage, and the discipline to lead by example. The reality asks for patience, diplomacy, and the instinct to stay useful enough but never threatening. One builds respect. The other builds stability.
And most companies, if we are honest, prefer stability. Stability requires engineers to act the way you describe but talk the way I do. You talk about the ideal, you even believe you walk it, but because no one can see your impact, no one can tell the difference.
I've held the ranking of staff in many companies. I've interacted with principals, staff, and distinguished engineers and I can tell you visibility is required to fulfill the ideal. If visibility wasn't there, than the person earned the rank through other un-ideal means.
> Then your case is the exception, not the rule. To reach the level of principal, you generally have to be recognized for delivering high impact. Visibility is not just ego, it is how organizations perceive value.
Of course you need visibility and impact. But it's not the kind of crass taking credit for what other people did that the original poster talked about.
As a principal you need to actively build visibility because so much of your work is normally invisible. It means being an active participant with discussions with leadership, clearly being the person that sets the agenda on something, becoming someone who other principals turn to on a topic and then report to their managers, leading the conversations on a topic, being the person that people can bring a hard problem to and then see results, picking up on a business need first and finding a way to deliver on it, etc.
In the example I gave for the quiet change in direction of that project, there are many ways in which I get visibility. I told my manager this was a risk and I have a strange solution. I told the manager of that project. The other principals that I needed to involve and their directors know I pushed this. My VP knows because no one talked about that kind of feature until I did. I checked how crazy this direction change would be with more senior scientists and product people. I actively make sure that these gentle communications happen, and in a sense they're natural, because I'm taking the lead on something.
But no one is going out of their way to say "I take credit for all of this work that everyone else did".
> A principal who keeps their head down, avoids controversy, and stays on friendly terms with the right directors can outlast a dozen brilliant but abrasive engineers.
I don't think that abrasive people should become principals until they change their ways. There's so much cross-org coordination that you need to do, if you're abrasive, that's going to hurt everyone.
That doesn't mean you should be a pushover. I don't back down from technical arguments if I know I'm right and have the data to back it up. I have gotten into deep weeks-long disagreements reported far up to chain. But it's important that you can still go have lunch with your peers and collaborate on other topics even while you're trying to show that they're totally wrong in one area. That's part of building trust.
> In that reality, being invisible is not a liability. It can be a strategy.
A strategy to be fired. This is not viable.
There is no tension between "quiet authority" and visibility. If you're invisible no one will ever come to you. Visibility is what consistently demonstrates to people that talking to you will make their lives better.
Not true at all. Plenty of invisible people in the world who don't get fired. You're ignorant.
Your initial post talked about lack of visibility, now you're talking about it as if it's required comically to the point of claiming that "invisible" people are absolutely on the path to get fired or that people who keep their head low and don't grab attention isn't a strategy. Ever heard of the saying the tallest blade of grass is the first to be cut? Also have you seen how Xi, the current leader of China rose to power?
Part of being a principal is the perception of principled and expert reasoning/expertise. That means being able to flip what you're saying on the fly so that other people continue to perceive you as an expert who knows what they are talking about. Did you say something that was completely off and wrong and it made no sense? How do you hide this from the people above you?
You expertly did this with your response. First you say you take none of the credit, now you say taking credit and being visible is required. Expert pivot and THIS is truly the primary skill of a principal engineer and you display it unequivocally.
You don't even need to actually be responsible for all the changes you claimed to have influenced. You just need people to perceive the reality as if you were responsible. And I see this kind of BS in many, many engineering organizations.
A lot of this is self delusion too. These high level strategies and directions aren't hard to come up with. Likely tons of lower engineers have thought of the method too, they just don't have the "visibility" or the time to actually drive that direction into the organization. Some people tend to think the ideas they have are genius and that these ideas are what makes them "principle". No. It's mostly politics that puts you into a position to take credit for ideas anyone can come up with.
Then your case is the exception, not the rule. To reach the level of principal, you generally have to be recognized for delivering high impact. Visibility is not just ego, it is how organizations perceive value. If your work earns you no visible credit, then no one really knows what you contribute. And if no one knows, how could anyone justify promoting you in the first place.
That is the ideal. In the ideal world, principals are elevated because they have a visible history of making the system better. They build frameworks that others rely on. They turn chaos into structure. They guide teams through impossible projects. Their reputation is not something they chase, it forms naturally from the wake of their work. In the ideal, visibility is the residue of real impact. People talk about them because their fingerprints are on every success.
But the corporate world rarely functions on ideals. In the real world, power accrues to whoever is closest to power. Titles often flow through social gravity more than technical merit. Some people climb because they deliver, others because they simply survive long enough to become unmovable. The higher you go, the more politics matters and the less evidence is required. Impact becomes subjective. Influence becomes reputation. And reputation, once earned, decays slowly.
In that reality, being invisible is not a liability. It can be a strategy. A principal who keeps their head down, avoids controversy, and stays on friendly terms with the right directors can outlast a dozen brilliant but abrasive engineers. The irrelevant survive because they are not a threat to anyone’s ego. The company quietly carries them, paying tribute to their title while forgetting their function.
Even the ideal, though, cannot escape the need for visibility. A principal who does great work in secret still fails the fundamental requirement of leadership: to be seen. Influence requires perception. You cannot guide a culture if nobody knows you are there. Quiet impact might keep systems healthy, but it does not create belief, and belief is what organizations promote. The best engineers learn to make their results legible. They translate their impact into stories others can tell. Without that, the work disappears into the background noise of everyone else’s effort.
So there are really two systems running in parallel. The first is the ideal, where promotion is earned through visible excellence and quiet authority. It demands both impact and awareness. The second is the reality, where promotion is often granted through time served, connections maintained, and an ability to avoid friction. The ideal rewards contribution; the reality rewards endurance.
You can succeed in either system, but they ask for different currencies. The ideal asks for mastery, courage, and the discipline to lead by example. The reality asks for patience, diplomacy, and the instinct to stay useful enough but never threatening. One builds respect. The other builds stability.
And most companies, if we are honest, prefer stability. Stability requires engineers to act the way you describe but talk the way I do. You talk about the ideal, you even believe you walk it, but because no one can see your impact, no one can tell the difference.
I've held the ranking of staff in many companies. I've interacted with principals, staff, and distinguished engineers and I can tell you visibility is required to fulfill the ideal. If visibility wasn't there, than the person earned the rank through other un-ideal means.