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Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path

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Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path

#41

Post by lordfoom »

marcinzm wrote: post #24

Being a technical leader is a set of skills that is distinct from being a great IC and those skills overlap management in many ways (meetings, dealing with people, diffusing conflict, getting buy in, etc.). Except you don't have resources to leverage directly except your own, now very limited, time so everything is 10x harder. I was in that boat, eventually I got tired and just got into management.

>Being a technical leader is a set of skills that is distinct from being a great IC

Sorry if I'm being dim - what's an IC?

Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path

#42

Post by virgilp »

dominotw wrote: post #40
virgilp wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For context I have 2 medals at IOI in highschool. I'm not the most competent in the world (best in my country took 4, all of them gold) but still I'm not too shabby. Am I as good as I was in my 20s? No. But the truth is that most people can't do the simple recursion... very few places will deny you employment because you can't invent original algorithms on the spot. They'd just fail tou for simple examples like the o…

ok. But You haven't answered my questions. Re that example, I was just using this famous tweet. https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 You don't get a job solving simple recursion problems. You have to solve hard leetcodes.

I don't know what "hard leetcodes" look like... even in my teens I failed to solve _some_ problems. But what I can tell you is that I switched jobs less than a year ago, I was given as part of the interview process a link to solve 3 problems online in 1h30m and solved them all in 1h. Now, were they rated "hard"? I don't know, honestly.

Also, 2years ago (I think) I participated in Amazon TechO(n) challenge... I was 1st after the weekend, but couldn't work on it during the week (no time/ kids) so by Friday my solution ended up 5th or 6th I think.

[ninja edit] No, I'm not faster, I'm a lot slower. In fact I probably lost most of my speed in the first few years when I stopped competing... but it's not a linear function, at some point, you don't lose any more speed; and just a quick refresher every now and then can boost your abilities back to fairly high levels. And most interview problems are not really competition problems, they're fairly basic.

And no, I don't write algorithms from scratch currently, the company I work for might actually be characterized as "boring" by many people("robotic process automation" - look it up). But I've lived to learn that when there's lots of money involved, there's also lots of interesting problems to solve - one just needs to find them.

Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path

#43

Post by inerte »

nilkn wrote: post #4

In my experience, many companies legitimately don't really know what to do with very senior engineering staff. And how many distinguished engineers or principal engineers or technical fellows do you really need for your relatively straightforward technical challenges anyway? The IC track often fails to work in practice for the simple reason that technical work at an extremely high level is just not needed at many com…

When I was an IC wanting to be promoted ASAP I kept hearing from management "We need to see if the org needs this [particular high level] role"

Took me a while to understand this is true. You can't have an org with the wrong ratio of "architects/leads" and coders. Or tech leads and engineers, whatever terms you prefer. An org with 2 teams doesn't need 5 people coordinating cross-team work. An org with 40 teams needs more than 40 engineers, and so on.

Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path

#44

Post by TuringNYC »

lordfoom wrote: post #41
marcinzm wrote: post #24

Being a technical leader is a set of skills that is distinct from being a great IC and those skills overlap management in many ways (meetings, dealing with people, diffusing conflict, getting buy in, etc.). Except you don't have resources to leverage directly except your own, now very limited, time so everything is 10x harder. I was in that boat, eventually I got tired and just got into management.

>Being a technical leader is a set of skills that is distinct from being a great IC Sorry if I'm being dim - what's an IC?

Individual Contributor (ie working without others under you in the org chart)

Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path

#45

Post by arnarbi »

lordfoom wrote: post #41
marcinzm wrote: post #24

Being a technical leader is a set of skills that is distinct from being a great IC and those skills overlap management in many ways (meetings, dealing with people, diffusing conflict, getting buy in, etc.). Except you don't have resources to leverage directly except your own, now very limited, time so everything is 10x harder. I was in that boat, eventually I got tired and just got into management.

>Being a technical leader is a set of skills that is distinct from being a great IC Sorry if I'm being dim - what's an IC?

Individual contributor, i.e. a non-leadership role

Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path

#46

Post by [deleted] »

nilkn wrote: post #22
baron_harkonnen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience has been that the value of very senior technical staff is not that they solve "extremely high level" technical problems but they are very easily able to see how what appears to be a complex problem is isomorphic to a much simpler, easy to solve problem. The difference between expert and advanced/intermediate technical staff is that the advanced engineer has an understanding of complex solution and mista…

The fact that folks can't even agree on what constitutes a very senior IC is definitely part of the problem. I would consider what you describe here -- reducing complexity as opposed to increasing it -- a requirement of any senior engineer. I don't see this as the hallmark of a principal or distinguished engineer but rather one of the basic differences between a developer and a senior developer.

[deleted]

Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path

#47

Post by mi100hael »

The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier does a good job covering the various steps from technical individual contributor all the way up through the ranks of management and looks at questions like when to stop getting involved in technical decision making. Would recommend for anyone interested in pursuing a leadership role.

Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path

#49

Post by lordfoom »

TuringNYC wrote: post #44
lordfoom wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Being a technical leader is a set of skills that is distinct from being a great IC Sorry if I'm being dim - what's an IC?

Individual Contributor (ie working without others under you in the org chart)

Okay that makes sense, thank you.

Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path

#50

Post by hadsed »

shantly wrote: post #15
dominotw wrote: post #3

This is bad advice. If you are hitting 40's, please do yourself a favor and go into management. Yes coding is fun but, 1. Not being able to change jobs because you can't invert a binary tree in 20 secs in leetcode hazing, is not fun. 2. Being managed by someone a decade younger than you with no family or responsibilities, is not fun. 3. Spending your weekends learning the latest JS framework because you don't want to…

I'm trying but at 35 haven't formally held a title that meant I was leading others. Every posting even for a team lead wants 3 years or 5 years or whatever of leadership already, and that's not even really a management position most places. An MBA and re-entering at the bottom would be very expensive, in direct costs and lost wages. What's the way in? Hope you find yourself in a job where there are leadership positio…

You should take a look at startups, especially keep your eyes peeled for the growing ones. You’ll have to read the culture to see how they choose managers (promote from within or hire from outside) but opportunities are usually abound and companies just need to get things done. Try to hold out for people above you that you really like and are good, kind folks that want to see you grow. That’s also typically a good approximation of company culture in general, in addition to a good litmus test of whether your bosses can help you in your career progression.
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