Why Senior Engineers Should Stay ICs

Counter opinion: if you want to advance in your career, always opt for management roles when given an option, even if you feel you don't love the shitwork that comes with it. Management is more versatile, more leveraged, and always has a seat at the table, whereas senior IC's power is serving at the peril of some manager. I would argue the most senior ICs that actually are successful are also managers who are afforded the luxury of not writing reviews and crappy paperwork pieces of the management, and thus are told they are ICs.

Another aspect of this is only a few companies really afford to have serious IC tracks beyond a certain point (basically FB and Google). Many more companies would be looking for senior management roles than senior IC roles, even if the absolute number of positions is lower; plus senior ICs are usually hired in their core specialization (e.g. networking expert is not automatically hired for ML in the same level,) whereas managers are seen as useful in different domains, giving them practical mobility.

If you're a senior IC who does strategy, then the term "IC" is misapplied. You want to be a 1/2x engineer, not a 10x engineer.

I was a Sr Principal for about ~3 years, which taught me that the most valuable thing I could do was drive discussions to decisions, quickly and mostly painlessly.

Your job is to run good meetings to conclusions - any meeting which causes a follow-up meeting is a bad one.

However, that job get immensely harder if you can't understand complex technical things and tie-break decisions quickly. If your feet are not on the ground, you can't understand exactly why someone wants an API to be cut exactly at this level of abstraction.

If you have a bunch of motivated people working for you, this works in your advantage as they will grab you before the meeting to make sure you understand exactly what they are going to present & if both sides do it, then you will come into the meeting with more information than you could have gathered on your own.

And then the project will go ahead, things will break, whichever fork was taken. If you cannot jump in at that point to fix things or at least roll up your sleeves to get your hands dirty, then your opinion will slowly stop mattering to people.

So after quarterly planning has been done, you need to dig up some time to get into the thing that you think is the most risky thing that was decided upon, but work on it instead of asking for status reports.

About 6 hours of my weeks used to be 1:1s with people, mostly outside the office and on walk in a loop.

This happens because you are influential in the organization as a senior engineer - you get told the struggles, hopes and expectations of engineers, which allow you to run backchannels into the management tier whether it is about recognition, money or just personal stress factors.

All of this stops working when you aren't able to do the work that an IC can do, but your other 50% of time is made more valuable by the 50% of time you spend fixing things in the guts of the system. I'm only half kidding, mostly I could only do a day a week of coding at best, the rest is just eaten up like this.

I do wonder how AI changes this.

I think for a long time, if you genuinely wanted to have a large organizational impact, eventually you needed to go into management. One person can only do so much.

Ignoring bureaucracy and organizational constraints (probably far fetched), a single individual might be accomplish to do 10x more in the near future. Especially since a individuals will always move significantly faster than all the coordination that comes with managing a team. Maybe middle management becomes less relevant as a result?

It is indeed a delicate balance, and different companies take it in different directions. I've seen ICs who focus almost entirely on a single pillar with minimal collaboration needed, but I've also seen Principal Engineers who were essentially part-time PMs. It really depends on what the person's strong suit is, or what gaps they naturally end up filling.

Counter: I was once promoted to a management role and I hated it. I kept it up for a year and then went back to dev in another company.

Not all people want to be in meaningless meetings, shuffling people around and dealing with their personal/career growth, dealing with project plannings and Gantt charts, preparing presentations for upper management, etc.

/rant :)