I’ve long been irritated when people mix up “principal” and “principle” in job titles and elsewhere. If you’re unsure about this yourself, please read Grammar Girl’s estimable explainer on the subject. Recently, while doing some prospecting on LinkedIn – and learning the ins and outs of advanced and Boolean searches – I thought to check how widespread the error is…
I’m happy to report that nine out of ten software engineers got it right. Alas, searching the totality of titles for “principal” pulled 603,243 results vs 26,630 for “principle” giving an error rate of only 4%, so software engineers appear more prone to this error than others. Assuming, of course, that all of the “principle” titles really should be “principal” titles.
To the four thousand plus principle software engineers who probably should be principal software engineers, I’d suggest either fixing it, or really committing to the principle and becoming principled software engineers, like these two:
After all, who would want to hire any other kind?