Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path
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Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path
#2In my company there is a technical path but it’s really really hard to advance on it compared to the managerial path. We have one guy who is really high on the technical path but he was director before and was a bad manager so they moved him to the technical path. Otherwise I haven’t seen anybody technical promoted beyond the same pay grade of the lowest ranked managers. So it seems to me that the manager path is better just for the fact that it pays better.
In addition, a lot of of the main decisions are being made by management before engineers even get involved. Don’t know how to improve this but from what I have seen in other companies this seems fairly standard.
Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path
#3This 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 be someone "who doesn't keep up", is not fun.
4. Being paid less than the lowest grade manager, is not fun .
5. And be honest with yourself, do you really need 20 yrs of coding experience to write CRUD apps? What exactly are you bringing to the table.
There is no such thing as "IC track" for almost every one of us, please shake yourself out of your delusion.
Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path
#4In 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 companies as much as engineers want to believe. Very senior ICs are also difficult to manage in the sense that the more you pin them down to specific work or projects the less you benefit from their skills. But sometimes all you need is to be able to assign someone to a specific project that isn't all that glorious or interesting or hard but is valuable and needs to be done by a certain time.
Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path
#5In 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…
It would probably work if the people managers stayed out of the technical side but in reality most managers like to make technical decisions so there is not much space for senior engineers.
Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path
#6In 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…
It would probably work if the people managers stayed out of the technical side but in reality most managers like to make technical decisions so there is not much space for senior engineers.
It's questionable to me whether an engineering manager can stay out of the technical side completely and actually be competent at their job. I think many non-managers underestimate how technical engineering management actually is. You often have to have a solid understanding of a very wide swathe of the organization's technology, including services whose code you haven't even had a chance to work on. In some ways it's not all that different from some of the expectations for very senior IC roles.
Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path
#7This 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…
In my early 40s, I am starting to reluctantly wonder if this is true after all. I don't like it, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's not true.
Another point is: In many/most actual organizations, it's the people managers making strategic technical decisions, not anyone on any other track.
Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path
#8My problem in the senior IC track at my company is that of how to influence people to get things done. Managers can very easily utilize resources, where the IC has to convince people and then also horse trade on priorities between managers who usually own a certain area and can’t really spare much help.
Strike teams seem to the most effective thing for ICs to lead, and having that be an explicit part of eng culture and the work processes is a prerequisite for that.
Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would probably work if the people managers stayed out of the technical side but in reality most managers like to make technical decisions so there is not much space for senior engineers.
It's questionable to me whether an engineering manager can stay out of the technical side completely and actually be competent at their job. I think many non-managers underestimate how technical engineering management actually is. You often have to have a solid understanding of a very wide swathe of the organization's technology, including services whose code you haven't even had a chance to work on. In some ways it'…
Managers don't need to do that however someone needs to attend organizational meetings and deal will all the inter-team semi-technical stuff that keeps a company running. That person will tend to be involved in technical decisions to the extent that they have organizational knowledge and influence. You can have ICs do that however most would prefer a root canal and many lack of the soft skills for it.
Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would probably work if the people managers stayed out of the technical side but in reality most managers like to make technical decisions so there is not much space for senior engineers.
It's questionable to me whether an engineering manager can stay out of the technical side completely and actually be competent at their job. I think many non-managers underestimate how technical engineering management actually is. You often have to have a solid understanding of a very wide swathe of the organization's technology, including services whose code you haven't even had a chance to work on. In some ways it'…
I always take it as a red flag when a manager wants to be responsible for technical decisions.
The best managers I've worked with have always made it their mission to serve technical teams by removing obstacles and making sure that the specialists have everything they need in order to create a high quality product. Managers who try to babysit developers and tell them how to do their jobs tend to just slow things down and lead to lower quality results.