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Although, I’m not disregarding his points. I’m just saying that this article feels less about the challenges of becoming an EM and more about the challenges of stepping down from EM to IC.
This is missing something... the friend wouldn't immediately become a staff engineer - that could take just as long, or longer, than a promotion to middle management.
At least where I am, the staff engineer equivalent (called Technical Fellow here) is considered Director or VP equivalent. In an engineering org of thousands, we have tens of these positions.
Or, if I've misjudged what "staff engineer" means, our next lower position would be principal engineer (typically 1 in 10-15 engineering ICs, roughly). And their salaries are in the ballpark of our engineering managers.
Anyway, all this sort of misses the point - it's two completely different jobs. I know plenty of people who don't want to manage people. Or tried and hated it. And plenty of people who are bored with coding and want a chance to put their management skills to work.
EDIT - grabbed this from another comment... - L1: Intern with undergrad degree - L2: Intern with graduate degree - L3: Junior - L4: Intermediate - L5: Senior - L6: Staff - L7: Senior Staff - L8: Principal - L9: Distinguished - L10: Fellow
We have fewer levels than that... - Engineering Intern - Engineer 1 - Engineer 2 - Senior Engineer - Lead Engineer - Principal - Senior Principal - Tech Fellow
So, staff is somewhere close to our Lead or Principal, who earn similar money as line managers. And only Principal+ are on a bonus plan (where all people managers are). For any of the lower ICs, a bonus is a rare thing (where for higher positions and managers, it's part of the comp package).
As we demand more productivity out of our devs, we’ll be demanding similar efficiency gains from our managers as well, and that means they’ll need to be doing more than just pushing paper and cheerleading.
So if you do go into management, keep in mind you can’t let your engineering skills atrophy… you now have to be good at both. There aren’t many people who can do both well, but companies will expect this moving forward.
I’ve barely gotten far enough to be drawn in by the article and then I get a giant popup (on mobile) to subscribe to read more posts like this.
Put it at the very end and I might. I’ve made it a habit to just exit the article whenever this happens. Nobody respects each other’s time in today’s internet, more intrusiveness = numbers go up.
Rant done
I cannot be alone in feeling that titles (within "tech" in particular) are almost completely arbitrary? What constitutes a "senior", "lead", "principal" and "staff" X, respectively, has so much overlap that it really depends on the organisation. I myself have been called all of those things, but have honestly not been able to tell the difference: in some cases, I have had much more responsibility as a "senior backend…
It wouldn't surprise me if it's a way of gatekeeping salaries since years of employment typically outnumber the levels of title that are achievable in one's career.
> But even if you don’t give in to the constant FOMO - it’s impossible to argue that the way we worked hasn’t changed. Almost every part of our work looks different, and will continue to evolve.
My experience is anecdotal, but this seems to be overblown. I'd say that almost every part of my work looks pretty identical to how it did a few years ago, and that the changes are relatively small in scope so far. Most of the arguments I've heard from those who advocate adopting AI tools are that the rate at which the tools are improving is exponential (or super-exponential, or whatever), which is a prediction about how it will change rather a claim that it has already reached a point that it's necessary. I don't pretend to have any expertise that lets me evaluate those predictions better than anyone else, but unless I happen to be a severe outlier, it seems like gross hyperbole to claim that every part of our work has already changed.
I'm a former EM who would never go back in an AI age. EMs deal with friction and from my experience more output is more friction. You have org leaders and businessy people putting their foot on the gas because AI is so productive and then programmers shipping 2-3x more code. These two forces collide and you're stuck dealing with the friction so 10x the amount of initiatives you did before. The friction is like sandpa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Engineering Manager positions often have more of an upside with bonuses / incentives than Engineers get Not really. Staff Eng and above will end up making similar to an EM including bonuses and has much more job mobility. You have to remember that most EM roles only open up once you hit Staff, so you are basically taking much more responsibility and longer hours for a marginal salary impact. Engineering Manager job…
> Staff Eng .... has much more job mobility Not really. Above Staff and Staff+ companies are usually looking for expertise in domain, in addition to cross org leadership. Unless you want to get hired with Sr title. Management is different though, you have highly transferrable skillset, managing people, up and down.
Of course this also means the pool of people who can do your job or quickly learn it includes essentially every other EM.
And many of those people are looking for jobs now.
For an IC, no one can become an expert in Rust overnight.
I cannot be alone in feeling that titles (within "tech" in particular) are almost completely arbitrary? What constitutes a "senior", "lead", "principal" and "staff" X, respectively, has so much overlap that it really depends on the organisation. I myself have been called all of those things, but have honestly not been able to tell the difference: in some cases, I have had much more responsibility as a "senior backend…
> that it really depends on the organisation. This is entirely it. Titles should be consistently ordered within an organization, but they are not portable from one organization to another. This is a lesson I’ve had to explain over and over to people at the beginning of their careers. I’ve been asked for advice about which offer to take from people thinking about leaving 10s of thousands of dollars on the table becaus…
Titles are fungible, but your comp isn't. Don't let a company sell you on a better title for less comp, especially when the JD or role doesn't align with the title; the next place won't give a shit what your title was if all you did was Junior-level work because you bought into someone else's narrative rather than control your own.
Totally agree, completely different skillset. Every engineer I've seen "promoted" as such becomes miserable, and frankly is not very good at their new role, effectively making it a double loss.