I want my career path as a developer to never be anything but individual contributor. I like teaching newer Devs but I don't want to manage them. Maybe I'm being naive?
I just wish I had a career path at all.
Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
61–70 of 674 posts
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon has a whole tree of long tenured engineers that are strictly ICs. Principle engineers are still ICs
The principal engineer role usually comes with expected impact on a big organization or even the whole company. Having that kind of impact is impossible as an “IC” in the traditional sense. Unless you are in some very cutting edge area, or get very lucky, your principal role will involve a big dose of the same leadership and management tasks that a manager or director would have.
So what is your vision of IC "in the traditional sense"?
Most senior engineers at organizations require a significant amount of coordination and people-skills. If you're not managing a team, you're definitely managing the relationship with your manager and coworkers/project teammates.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#63I want my career path as a developer to never be anything but individual contributor. I like teaching newer Devs but I don't want to manage them. Maybe I'm being naive?
Some people spend their whole careers like this, there is nothing wrong with it. I personally avoided management for years, until I was offered a lead role over a team of roughly 4 people in Feb 2020. I had been working on the product for years and knew all the ins and outs and had a vision for its future. Cue the pandemic and everyone going remote - and the project ballooning to 25 people across three organizations.…
Hell yeah. This is a great response. Lots of positivity and challenging the usual HN tropes! More of this please.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#64I've been a manager once- only because of necessity while working at a rapidly growing startup- and it's not a role for me. I loved being an IC at Google and other employers, and no matter how much I tried, I couldn't convince myself that by being a manager I'd have more impact, or achieve more of my goals, or be happier.
I'd like to see more people-managers who aren't also product-managers and tech-leads: people whose job is to manage people, not work on the technical side of what the managed people work on. Some people are really good at this and should focus on it, to the exclusion of coding.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#65What exactly is an "individual contributor"? I'm confused. This term has come out of nowhere in the past 5 years, and it sounds like you're referring to someone who backed a kickstarter campaign. If this is the new term for "employee", I'm out. I can't stand that companies refer to their customers as "consumers".
Someone who does not manage others.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#66What exactly is an "individual contributor"? I'm confused. This term has come out of nowhere in the past 5 years, and it sounds like you're referring to someone who backed a kickstarter campaign. If this is the new term for "employee", I'm out. I can't stand that companies refer to their customers as "consumers".
> If this is the new term for "employee", I'm out
AFIACT, it's intended to distinguish between employees who manage people and those who don't. I.e. "the set of employees is the set of managers plus the set of individual contributors."
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#67I had cautiously gotten into management because I wanted to learn the skills of delegatin and really building through others and growing/coaching others. I thoroughly enjoyed this. But over time what I had realized was the role had been changing (not sure if it was just for pandering) towards being a mouth piece for leadership and hr - having to relay decisions I didn't believe in (perf seasons, promo rationales, layoffs anybody?) As if they were on purely my own. Given Ive always enjoyed building this may actually be a good forcing function to go back to IC and just ... Build!
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Resolving interpersonal disputes and guessing how much you have to pay someone to get them to stay, and software architecture, are two (three?) totally unrelated skillsets.
You don't need to "guess" how much to pay someone. The market dictates that. HR has pay bands. Raises are always in a narrow band. I don't know what kind of disputes you're talking about. If you ask any manager - describe your responsibilities succinctly, they will most inevitably fail to do so.
I can imagine a company that had pay bands so narrow and bonuses so small that managers had no tools to reward high performers, and although I agree that it would take away a lot of what allows managers to do their jobs, I don't think that is the usual situation.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
And to be fair, until about 2015 or so, all managers at FB were expected to be able to do their reports job. This is definitely a good move, as I've heard some horror stories of management bloat at FB since I left in 2018.
That is interesting. I've been working in the field professionally for 22+ years and I've never had a manager that had any technical skills. None of them could even begin to do my job.
That is interesting. I've been working in the field professionally 20 years (I'm not including grad school or postdocs) and every manager I've had had technical skills (deep ones) although most of them couldn't have done my job exactly the same way I did. Some would have done it better. Others, worse. Even others- would have cancelled the project, or morphed it into something else entirely.
Re: Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I want my career path as a developer to never be anything but individual contributor. I like teaching newer Devs but I don't want to manage them. Maybe I'm being naive? You can do this, but you will have to accept the plateau. There's really nowhere to go beyond Staff/L6, unless you're some super genius full of brilliant ideas or luck into being involved in a game changing product launch. Everything beyond that beco…
The same applies to being a manager though. You're not going to get promoted forever in any role, at some point you'll hit a terminal level, whether that's in an IC track or a management track. And it's not a problem as long as you find your work fulfilling.
>The same applies to being a manager though.
It depends. If you're able to side-step the middle manager doldrums to Director/VP, and you know how to play the game, the sky's the limit. But IC's are pretty hard capped at L6 short of being involved in the creation of a new business.