A question I get a lot: "What exactly does a Principal Engineer do at AWS?"

Every PE plays a mix of roles unique to them, so I put together this rough estimate of how I personally spent my time in 2019, broken down into a few buckets of activities

This is how I defined the types of activities that fall into each bucket

The quarterly view is interesting, very aligned to the annual org calendar. Q1/Q3 is when we do org-level career discussions (high on 'Team'). Annual roadmap planning/brainstorming is mostly in Q2 (high on 'Product'). Q4's reInvent means high 'Project' & 'External' activity.

I used @infogram to visualize the data - their tool makes it so pretty! You can see the full infographic here: https://infogram.com/2019-year-in-review-1hmr6gxgr5g34nl