by light_hue_1 | 2025-10-25 05:53:55+00:00
> In short, you manage people. You tell others what to do and you think about what to do.

As a principal scientist I definitely don't manage people.

Mainly, people managers have power to tell people what to do and when. I have zero power over anyone. No one needs to listen to me. Ever. If people ignore me there's literally no one I can complain to. And no one tells me what to do. If I wasn't competent at my job I'd be sitting alone in an office staring at a wall.

The reason why anyone would ever talk to me is because I have well over a decade of experience more than every other scientist in my org (200+ people) doing very complicated things, at scale, across many areas of AI/ML, and publishing many dozens of papers in top venues. So I know what I'm doing and can find problems, shortcuts, keep them from wasting time, find creative fixes to AI/ML issues, and see connections to business problems. Basically help scientists deliver better features faster. I can find new projects that those scientists are excited about. And I can communicate with product, managers, leaders about very complex technical ideas in ways that more junior scientists cannot.

People in my org come to me because I provide value basically. Not because they have to.

> You tell 10x people to do 10x work and you get 10x the credit when management only is like 1x of talent and effort.

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. 20% is working on projects that scale with many people. 10% is strategy for new experiments and projects.

For the vast majority of what I do other people get 100% of the credit and my name is a small footnote at best.

Maybe an example would help. Sorry that I need to be a bit vague. A large project recently was going in a particular direction. I saw two months ahead of time that this direction was going to run out of steam for a combination of science and business reasons. It would end up missing metrics. Leadership was asking for something that was broadly correct but subtly wrong. I spent a month finding a new direction that was the opposite of what everyone thought we had to do, finding the right small 1-2 person experiments to derisk the new direction, get senior people to understand it and agree to it, set up the correct relationships to make it viable, and then I had the evidence to convince project leadership and management to shift. A few days later we had a VP review and the response was that they're delighted with the direction, it's far better than they ever though, and this will be a flagship for an org with tens of thousands of employees. That review would have gone horribly without what I did because the problem I saw two months ahead of time would have surfaced and the project would be seen as dying and aimless. But the team got the credit for being on top of things as a whole, not me. As it should be.

> They are managers that don't need to do 1 on 1s.

I have more 1:1s than managers, because they can afford to just tell people what to do. I need to develop junior scientists, keep relationships up, stay on top of other orgs, business priorities, etc.

Managers fail by creating chaos around them. Principals fail by becoming irrelevant.