There’s only one reason (and only one) I would want to move from the coder/IC role to managerial track — and that is the white-boarding interview rounds that is needed every single time I want to switch jobs which needs (almost) excruciating preparation afresh - from scratch. (Yes yes, there are roles without that and that’s incredibly rare). Often, I just stay in the same job thinking of that preparation and saying, “oh god, not again!”.
From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate
101–110 of 208 posts
Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate
#102And here I am, 12 years into my career as a software engineer, never, ever, wanting to be a manager. I just want to build things, I don't want to manage them. I see what it is like to be a manager as I work closely with them, and I just don't find it appealing at all. As a senior engineer, my words also often matter, but I don't have the huge amount of responsibility that comes with being a manager, which is nice. I…
How much your words matter as a senior engineer depend on your management. You’re in a good situation right now, but that can change. I was in a similar situation several years back. My boss liked me and had a lot of connections. He would make sure I was in the loop on everything, make sure I had a seat at the table when decisions were being made, and seek out my opinion on what direction we should go, and told me point blank I could speak for him or any other manager and he’d back it up if needed.
We have a whole new management structure now and they are very top down, have big egos, and aren’t willing to even entertain feedback. Vocal low level managers or engineers have been getting pushed out of the company left and right, so all the autonomy and the voice I had are pretty much gone. Even things that I thought were engineering decisions have been largely removed. I will need X to build what I’m building, so I make it and it worked. Then, months later, I’m told there is a different plan for X, I did it wrong, and I’m told to remove my solution (fully automated and hands off) in favor of a corporate process and manual work by other team, which is often missed, which makes my service less reliable.
I’m glad I’m not a manager who needs to fight with these people, as I’d probably be out of a job by now so they can replace me with one of their friends. That being said, I’ve found the influence of a senior level engineer to be highly variable, even within the same company/team, on a longer timeline.
Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate
#103I have been a manager four times, twice at FAANGs. I disagree with a lot that the author says: - The ladder isn’t really taller. Most EMs end up clustered at the equivalent of L6/staff engineer. Promotions to senior manager and beyond are situational and rare. Meanwhile, my peers on the engineering ladder get promoted when ready, without needing to wait for the stars to align. (I made it to senior manager, but I was…
Thanks for the feedback! I must say I've never worked in real big tech, and I've never worked with an IC beyond staff level. I'd imagine promotions to principal / fellow are quite rare as well? Besides, most "normal" companies don't have these grades, at all. By transferable, I mean skills that are useful outside of our big tech bubble. You might not want to go out as money is very nice, but still good to know you ca…
Quite a lot of smaller companies do have some sort of staff/principal level, though arguably it’s largely an excuse to pay people they want to retain more, and isn’t _that_ similar to staff/principal roles in Big Tech(TM).
Of course, companies on that scale don’t really have senior EMs in the Big Tech sense, either.
Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the feedback! I must say I've never worked in real big tech, and I've never worked with an IC beyond staff level. I'd imagine promotions to principal / fellow are quite rare as well? Besides, most "normal" companies don't have these grades, at all. By transferable, I mean skills that are useful outside of our big tech bubble. You might not want to go out as money is very nice, but still good to know you ca…
Ah right, I tend to think the tech bubble is the default context for stuff posted on HN, but of course that's just my bias. I think staff engineers are slightly more common than first level EMs, but senior EMs are slightly more common than senior staff. Beyond that, it's small numbers and hard to draw conclusions. The nuance I've felt is that promotions to staff and up on the IC ladder are more in your control, while…
> I think staff engineers are slightly more common than first level EMs
That’s going to depend a lot on company (and how they define staff vs senior; that varies quite a bit).
Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate
#105I have been a manager four times, twice at FAANGs. I disagree with a lot that the author says: - The ladder isn’t really taller. Most EMs end up clustered at the equivalent of L6/staff engineer. Promotions to senior manager and beyond are situational and rare. Meanwhile, my peers on the engineering ladder get promoted when ready, without needing to wait for the stars to align. (I made it to senior manager, but I was…
>The single most transferable skill I know in this industry is Linux internals. I'm glad it's not just me who has noticed this!
Would either of you mind expanding on this? What kind of roles have you held?
Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you remain 'senior software engineer' your salary will be constrained by the market range for that position. The salary range is somewhere from $100k to $600k in the US depending on the company. So if you hit the cap at your current company just move to one that pays more. If you've hit that limit at a top tier company then you can start moving to higher IC roles such as Staff.
The only senior (L5) engineer making 600k TC is one that has been at senior for several years and stock appreciation brought their RSU value way up. The high end for L5 is like half that.
Netflix would disagree.
Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
A couple of other points that struck me as different from my experience, and maybe more a function of where this person is working rather than some fundamental difference between the roles: The idea that your word is taken more seriously as an EM rather than an IC when it comes to (for example) needing to test more. I have to admit that this may have been one of the reasons I felt the need to switch to a management r…
> The fact that you have to stack rank and pick an under-performer every half is just broken. I've sworn to myself, that the moment that this idiotic idea get introduced in the "performance management" process at the place I work, will be the day that I'll start to send out resumes. Even if it were handled lottery style ("the short straw") I would not cut slack to either manager or company for such an indignity.
It mostly masquerades as performance curves.
You're not being told to pick someone, you're being told that your org cannot really have 80% of people meeting/exceeding expectations and that because reasons (budget), you should review the cusp cases and adjust them down.
Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Senior engineer is fairly low. At some point you may get tired of stagnating salary and being told what to do all the time. They are higher technical positions that have no or very little management responsibilities (up to senior principal engineer, architect, etc). It depends also on the company and how much they value you. Best I have seen is engineer with PhD and decades of experience be the research/architecture…
> Senior engineer is fairly low. At some point you may get tired of stagnating salary and being what to do all the time Or not. While I acknowledge that the mindset of chasing eternal growth and riches professionally is very common, is not hard to imagine a subset of people that are happy with staying in one rung of the ladder and get meaning from things outside their career.
Senior engineer is a "terminal" position at most companies, and certainly is not a bad spot. Only around 15-18% of engineers were above that at my last big tech company if I remember correctly.
Senior is the last IC level where you can pretty much exclusively focus on the technical work, in most cases. You can be very successful doing this! Staff and above roles can vary widely, but most of the time you're expected to have a multiplying effect on the team, which requires a lot more soft skills.
If a company has too many engineers above senior you run into a problem where everyone is looking for impact, but no one is doing the actual work!
Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate
#109Perhaps the best anecdote I've heard on this topic came from an older COBOL programmer who went from being programmer to manager back to programmer.
I asked him why we went back. He said "The problem is that they nip at you from the top, and they nip at you from the bottom."
Meaning a programmer usually has one primary boss nagging. A manager has a boss above nagging and people below nagging.
Re: From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Promotions on the engineering ladder " when ready without needing to wait for the star to align " is because very often those promotions only entail better title and pay. Periodic promotions keep people happy. But any promotions that entail a real step up in responsibility requires team/company growth for those positions to open up.
There are many different ways to grow beyond staff engineer: - Become an expert in something hard. Fix bugs nobody else can. This requires sticking around for longer than most people, maybe 10 years or more. - Have impact across the industry. Maintain a kernel subsystem, run a C++ subcommittee, etc. - Be a TL for multiple teams, because you have experience and a plan the other TLs can get behind. - Wear multiple hats…
> Become an expert in something hard. Fix bugs nobody else can.
This is risky advice. :) Context matters. It's going to sound very appealing to a self-motivated, mobile IC, and could work very well in orgs that value individual effort. But in many orgs, solo experts playing non-fungible roles are very big red flags, and can draw negative management attention. Maybe I could build a team around you... but I might not have the resources, or the problem might not warrant it. So I just might end up making your work life harder -- mitigating the risk by devaluing the service you're working on, just moving it to SaaS, or maybe keeping it but making you train up all your colleagues on the risk area (turning you into an unhappy tutor), etc.