One of my first interactions with a Principal 1 at Amazon was a design review for a design owned by a team that was not mine, merely adjacent to mine. Because I was 21 and a dumbass, I thought that this older guy would hew closer to a PM or a manager and say some sort of irrelevant/ignorant set of remarks rather than a bunch of clever, reasonable, and forward-looking things, and of course the latter is what he did. Amazon’s flavor of title to designate “extremely distinguished engineer” ↩