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Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path

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Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path

#31

Post by nilkn »

tannerc wrote: post #28
nilkn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that being involved in the technical side and "babysitting developers" are two very different ideas that have little to nothing to do with each other. > 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. I think you're underestimating the de…

Isn't what you're describing precisely what senior ICs should be doing more of? I agree with OP, the purpose of a manager isn't to manage the technical side of things but rather the people side. It's why they have direct rapports: to manage the people. A better use of the IC's time is to unblock them so they can meet with stakeholders and develop a rich understanding of the work in order to do it most effectively. In…

> Isn't what you're describing precisely what senior ICs should be doing more of?

Yes, and I think the point I'm driving towards is that if this is the stuff you want to do, you're really not an IC at all -- you're an engineering manager with zero reports who doesn't have any authority, so you're making life 10x harder for yourself.

Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path

#32

Post by bjt »

She's coming from Github/Microsoft. That is a very different environment than most of us. A company of that size has more money to pay people who live outside the regular product org and more opportunities to do "strike teams".

The bullet point list of strategic work that she provides mostly overlaps with what engineering managers do. It's valid to point out that you don't need people reporting to you to do it. It's very cool that she's been at companies that made that possible. But I think it's a mistake to say, as I think many commenters here are saying, that that's the only valid approach.

Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path

#33

Post by cpitman »

nilkn wrote: post #22
baron_harkonnen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience has been that the value of very senior technical staff is not that they solve "extremely high level" technical problems but they are very easily able to see how what appears to be a complex problem is isomorphic to a much simpler, easy to solve problem. The difference between expert and advanced/intermediate technical staff is that the advanced engineer has an understanding of complex solution and mista…

The fact that folks can't even agree on what constitutes a very senior IC is definitely part of the problem. I would consider what you describe here -- reducing complexity as opposed to increasing it -- a requirement of any senior engineer. I don't see this as the hallmark of a principal or distinguished engineer but rather one of the basic differences between a developer and a senior developer.

As my employer has tried to define the principal IC roles, I've actually seen the perceived qualifications of the original roles go down. IE, what would have been consider senior qualities are now principal qualities, and seniors need supervision. I believe it extends from the same root cause: not knowing how to get value out of a more senior role.

Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path

#34

Post by dominotw »

dfxm12 wrote: post #30
shantly wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying but at 35 haven't formally held a title that meant I was leading others. Every posting even for a team lead wants 3 years or 5 years or whatever of leadership already, and that's not even really a management position most places. An MBA and re-entering at the bottom would be very expensive, in direct costs and lost wages. What's the way in? Hope you find yourself in a job where there are leadership positio…

What's the way in? Hope you find yourself in a job where there are leadership positions open and the stars align and you're promoted into one? In corporate jobs, this is rarely the way in. Most likely, you'll have to convince your current manager (and maybe theirs) that you're ready to be a manager and look for a manager opening elsewhere in the company. If you think you're ready and your current employer does not, y…

> If you think you're ready and your current employer does not, you'll have to look outside.

Is it even possible to find a management position outside without management experience?

Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path

#35

Post by shantly »

dfxm12 wrote: post #30
shantly wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying but at 35 haven't formally held a title that meant I was leading others. Every posting even for a team lead wants 3 years or 5 years or whatever of leadership already, and that's not even really a management position most places. An MBA and re-entering at the bottom would be very expensive, in direct costs and lost wages. What's the way in? Hope you find yourself in a job where there are leadership positio…

What's the way in? Hope you find yourself in a job where there are leadership positions open and the stars align and you're promoted into one? In corporate jobs, this is rarely the way in. Most likely, you'll have to convince your current manager (and maybe theirs) that you're ready to be a manager and look for a manager opening elsewhere in the company. If you think you're ready and your current employer does not, y…

The requirement's usually tied to holding the title, like they want that to have been your full-time thing. It's been my experience that people see what you're doing in a very different light depending on your title (one title, one company one day, everyone second-guesses or ignores everything you say; different title, different company, a few days later, suddenly everyone's deferring to you in meetings and sincerely asking your opinion about everything to such a degree that it's unnerving) including in hindsight—if your title was "lead" you don't have to spend a ton of time explaining exactly how, as a non-"lead", you were leading to convince people you were, and you don't have to avoid giving the impression you were being "bossy" or overstepping by doing it.

[EDIT] my suspicion here is that yeah, it's basically "luck into it". I mean that's how everything else I've done career- and pay-progression-wise has worked (luck into someone tasking me with something they definitely wouldn't hire me to do, but after I've done it for a few months someone else would) so maybe this'll work out the same way.

Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path

#36

Post by virgilp »

dominotw wrote: post #29
virgilp wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spending your weekends learning the latest JS framework because you don't want to be someone "who doesn't keep up", is not fun. It's not about JS frameworks, but if you don't keep up with technology _because it's fun_; and you also what to be promoted very high on the ladder (aren't happy with "just" an average job with average pay that lets you have a decent life outside work) by all means do yourself a favor and…

> It's a simple recursion. why wouldn't I be able to do it? I fully expect to solve algorithms & data structures questions into my 60s faster than the average 20yo can (because of my background. Point is, it doesn't correlate with age, if you can't do it at 40 you probably weren't great at it at 20). ok. I was being facetious with that (particularly famous) example. you are able to breeze through hard leetcodes in yo…

For context I have 2 medals at IOI in highschool. I'm not the most competent in the world (best in my country took 4, all of them gold) but still I'm not too shabby.

Am I as good as I was in my 20s? No. But the truth is that most people can't do the simple recursion... very few places will deny you employment because you can't invent original algorithms on the spot. They'd just fail tou for simple examples like the one you presented. The amount of people who can't do a tree traversal unless it's DFS is staggering. (and in all honesty, not all of them are useless programmers... sometimes people would do amazing stuff despite failing basic algorithmic tasks. That's what makes hiring decisions so hard.)

[edit] > Can you give me some examples of better things that actually require 20yrs of experience ?

I saw this just now. Lots of things can use said 20yrs of experience... maybe even some CRUD apps (e.g. to know what to not over-design). Some things you probably can't do right without extensive experience (say, design a new programming langugage; or a new datastore). E.g. Rich Hickey famously designed Clojure because he wanted a better way to do those "CRUD apps". Also, it's quite easy to find a hard problem that you won't solve without extensive experience, no matter how smart you are (say: collaboration, data management & versioning in large AI teams). Pretty much any open-ended problem, really... remove all constraints and most programmers will get stuck. How many people can start with "void main()" (or equivalent) and actually release it to production, if the project takes a non-trivial amount of time to complete?

Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path

#37

Post by Spooky23 »

nilkn wrote: post #4

In 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…

I'd say that 80% of the time, the IC track is bad for the ambitious, non-consulting engineer ultimately, unless your plan is to move around alot, which is a strategy that gets riskier as you get older and better compensated. Even for the consultant, the path to growth is... hiring people and leveraging their labors!

End of the day, the size of your tribe or budget is a physical manifestation of your power in an organization. Power is how you get stuff done -- all of the right answers don't matter if you cannot realize the outcome. IMO, it's critical to grow as an engineer to be able to get others aligned to whatever task is at hand.

My career is very much in the applied space -- my perspective is someone delivering solutions, not inventing tech. It may be different for different disciplines/scopes.

Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path

#38

Post by Normal_gaussian »

cpitman wrote: post #33
nilkn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that folks can't even agree on what constitutes a very senior IC is definitely part of the problem. I would consider what you describe here -- reducing complexity as opposed to increasing it -- a requirement of any senior engineer. I don't see this as the hallmark of a principal or distinguished engineer but rather one of the basic differences between a developer and a senior developer.

As my employer has tried to define the principal IC roles, I've actually seen the perceived qualifications of the original roles go down. IE, what would have been consider senior qualities are now principal qualities, and seniors need supervision. I believe it extends from the same root cause: not knowing how to get value out of a more senior role.

I had senior in my title at my previous organisation. Something I found hilarious given my years.

The reasoning seemed to be autonomy. Until they hired people who were senior by age but not autonomous.

Engineering titles are a mess and it causes real problems when moving to another organisation.

Re: Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path

#40

Post by dominotw »

virgilp wrote: post #36
dominotw wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a simple recursion. why wouldn't I be able to do it? I fully expect to solve algorithms & data structures questions into my 60s faster than the average 20yo can (because of my background. Point is, it doesn't correlate with age, if you can't do it at 40 you probably weren't great at it at 20). ok. I was being facetious with that (particularly famous) example. you are able to breeze through hard leetcodes in yo…

For context I have 2 medals at IOI in highschool. I'm not the most competent in the world (best in my country took 4, all of them gold) but still I'm not too shabby. Am I as good as I was in my 20s? No. But the truth is that most people can't do the simple recursion... very few places will deny you employment because you can't invent original algorithms on the spot. They'd just fail tou for simple examples like the o…

ok. But You haven't answered my questions.

Re that example, I was just using this famous tweet.

https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768

You don't get a job solving simple recursion problems. You have to solve hard leetcodes.

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