Basically if you dont "hop" to management in the first 1-6 years into your career, it quickly becomes too late.

After years of discussion about this with my manager, I recently accepted a low level managerial role at my current company. It was a large step down title wise (from highest level IC title to low level manager title). The only reason I did this was because HR agreed to let me keep my current salary (albeit "frozen" until I get promoted)..

I found that in general the pay for entry level tech manager was a large pay-cut for me , but I was also under qualified for type of Director role.

Or maybe because they had no interest in management work?

If I can be allowed to split hairs a little, ackshually you're compensated based on your level/title which sometimes, but not always (maybe not even often) is proportional to your ability to create business value. Companies like to say that they pay based on business value because it sounds good. But they don't have really great ways to measure that, especially if you're not in sales.

The level/title is merely a tool that attempts to frame someone relative to the alternatives to make that determination easier.

Which is fine! I'd rather have my current salary and not have to manage people. I wouldn't want a manager's job for twice my salary. It would make me unhappy, and a spare salary wouldn't make it up to me.

And software is one of those things where an IC or small team lead can end up owning and being responsible for a huge amount of scope/impact.

is that not just another version of "shipping code"?

sure it's one degree removed from your physical fingers on the actual keyboard, but that junior only got to ship because of your mentorship/management

Being a force multiplier by being technical leadership to other devs is fine by me. I just don't want to spend all day in an office managing upwards.

Teaching people management skills is probably a whole heck of a lot easier than teaching them technical skills, but companies don't see it that way. Companies will pay top dollar for a fresh Harvard MBA, and put them in-charge of a large technology thing they know little about, but reject the idea of a IC8 moving into that role.

Imagine it the other way around; I would not expect the head of HR at my employer to move directly into a Staff Engineering position if they expressed interest in moving towards a technical role.

I share your bias, but if I'm being intellectually honest with myself, this is an unjustified bias.

Agreed with this, but only for traditional management track. Like if you want to be a CEO of a F500, you need to hop on the management track early and spend the time rising through the ranks. But there is more flexibility in startup world. In a small growing company you can have 15+ of exp as IC but quickly become VP or C level if you show aptitude and the situation allows for it. And if you have success there, you have generalized management credibility.

I only recently became a manager. I'm somewhere around year 28 of my career, depending on how you want to count some early jobs.

It happens.

You're telling me these guys are making absolute shitloads of money doing what they are good at and you're saying it as if that's a bad thing.

Sign me up. If I wanted to manage I'd have a business degree, not a CS degree.

Here you have motivated , respected, talented individuals who wants to take all of the things they have learned and apply it to a broader set of things across the company. They are literally asking to provide more value to the company by broadening the scope of their influence.

For a crappy sports analogy, its like never letting the MVP become a coach.

There's a reason athletes only become coaches after their prime. Once they can no longer be superstars on the field, they can try to pass on some knowledge to the next generation.

I don't really see how taking deep knowledge of stuff like databases and webservers and applying it to "broader sets of things" is useful. That's like taking rocket science knowledge and applying it to cooking. Sure, you may find some use for some stuff but the vast majority of your knowledge is just wasted now, it isn't being "applied to a broader set of things". It's just deteriorating.

Broader set of things != Different things.

So you don't think that moving a Distinguished NASA engineer with an illustrious 25 year career into management is a good idea? They arent moving fields, just positions within their field. Your cooking analogy doesn't apply.

The case example of this working well is Boeing, which was ran (top to bottom) mostly by engineers for a while.

That is not my experience. FAANG pays significantly more for the same level of management.

TC for mid-level manager/director at FAANG = TC for high level manager/VP/C-suite in non-FAANG

TC for maxx level IC in FAANG = Doesn't exist!

The ceiling for manager is higher and is actually possible, whereas you will literally never make an IC8 TC as an IC outside of FAANG, no matter what.

FAANGs, and SV more generally, have figured out how to leverage the effort of top-quality engineers to create tremendous business value. This is reflected in the performance of these stocks in the public market.

Other parts of the economy do not have the need for such high levels of technical skills. They simply don't know what to do with it! Hence they cannot pay ICs as high either.

We will eventually get to a point where few engineers, controlling larger number of computers, can produce significant business value. IC salaries will rise then.

Contrary to popular narratives, management outside the c-suite is a mostly a thankless grind with no glory. Getting competent people to do it requires some major incentives, and every team, at every level, requires management.

There is an endless availability of engineers who can push JSON to an API, but people who can lead a team, handle cross team comms, architect, and code the hard problems are fairly rare. This is why they command salaries comparable to specialist doctors.

Meanwhile, MBAs are an endless resource, given that that and Law School are the default for people who haven't figured out what they want to do in undergrad.

I would be thrilled to take on my VP or SVP's "thankless grind" for just 25% of their salary. There are probably many more like me lined up, too.

Isn't this sort of the point? It's not a matter of respect so much as impact. Having say director level impact as an IC requires working on the right sorts of problems, at the right sorts of scale, in an organization that is structured to take advantage of it. It shouldn't really be surprising that this doesn't describe most positions.

I agree with that, but my experience has been on the flip-side. At other companies when I get beyond staff level I've been expected to manage people, when my strength is on the technical side. Being able to lead technically and elevate the tech level of teams is more effective and rewarding for me. There are other ways to force-multiply without being a chain-of-communication person:

> Once you reach a certain level of seniority/experience you are just way more valuable in the force-multiplying role of "leader" than anything you can do with your hands on the keyboard.

This is the key statement. People don't like to hear this, but the reality is that it becomes incredibly difficult to move the needle to a sufficient degree as a high level IC. There are people who can pull this off, but the number of people who believe they can are orders of magnitude different than those who actually can.

For almost all people, all paths to be worth the lofty title involve being able to have an indirect influence on a larger sphere of influence as their hands on keyboard results only go so far. And however one wants to slice it, these paths start to sound like the types of things that people say they don't want to do when they decry "management". Influencing people, politics, mentorship, building trust & alignment, etc.

Leadership roles provide a clear path forward for this, but while there are other ways they tend to still get poopoo'd by the "I just want to code!" crowd.

Mind you, there's nothing wrong with "I just want to code!", I'm currently in such a phase myself. One just needs to be realistic about what that means for their progression.

If you spend enough time in threads on this topic here, you'll see people popping up complaining that there's no IC path forward without taking time away from coding and requiring building good soft skills.

What I was getting at is that with few exceptions, no such path exists.

You're 100% right that one doesn't need to go into leadership roles, and definitely not management roles, to get there. But one's hands on keyboard contributions will top out at some point and the only way to move the needle further is to do something else on top of that.

I personally separate the concepts of leadership and people management. So to me, most paths forward start to enter the sphere of "leadership" one way or another. But this is just nomenclature, YMMV.

> What I was getting at is that with few exceptions, no such path exists.

What I believe the post to be about is what such an exception could look like as a model for other orgs.

Even for hiring in the circumstances you describe, I don't think you're wrong per se. But there aren't many situations or people where I'd prefer someone who just wants to sit in a corner and code vs someone who can do all the other stuff at a high level too.

You think if you're an L8 manager at Google, you're going to get hired at some ecom hotdog startup and not take a MASSIVE pay cut?

This doesn't make sense to me. How? If I'm really fucking good with software development, how does it make sense to have me do something other than software development? If we were talking about tech lead or architect type positions I'd be in agreement, but what force are you multiplying otherwise?

The leaders in my company don't do any force multiplication. They just handle the shit we don't want to deal with, like talking to clients and being middle men. I don't see how a good developer is any better at any of that than some random person you pull off the street and I'd go as far as saying the dev is wasted in such a role. Grab someone with a business degree or some other bullshit who wants to do this stuff. Even the people who used to be devs quickly lose touch with the dev role once they transition to management.

Removing distractions and time-sucks from the engineers is a force multiplication though.

Like I just said in the message you responded to, anyone can do that role. It doesn't have to be a dev.

The goal of engineers at a company is not to write code but to generate some type of business value. Making engineers more efficient at generating business value by understanding client needs or coordinating across departments is force multiplication.

I think it's not about FAANG vs tech vs other sectors. It's about blow-out growth vs no growth. An IC has great value only when a company needs her to build something that directly impacts the top line. Otherwise, an IC is just a cog in giant machine. Of course, some ICs are so good that they can create opportunities in a well-established organization, but they are exceptions.