> Less hiring means fewer natural opportunities for growth.
IC's natural way of growth is to produce larger impact by solving harder problems, there are always hard unsolved problems which hold some business opportunities.
This is almost a myth. Think of it this way: you can either manage 5 people that solve a problem or you can solve a problem yourself that it would've taken 5 people to solve. At the end of the day, it's the scale of the problem that matters (not the technical "hardness"). Are there sometimes problems that one domain expert can solve, effectively and fully, that it would've taken 5 generalists to solve otherwise? Sure. Is it common? Not in "big tech".
it's very hard to tell when an individual has solved a problem that otherwise would have taken 5 people to solve... so you'll likely find that it's much easier for big tech to reward people for managing large teams or leading large teams to execute on a project rather than for solving such problems themselves
> Think of it this way: you can either manage 5 people that solve a problem
there are levels of problem you will struggle to find 5 people to solve it on avg senior dev salary
> Not in "big tech".
especially in big tech, where there is constant arm race in building systems handling millions QPS over petabytes of data and with all recent advanced AI.
> there are levels of problem you will struggle to find 5 people to solve it on avg senior dev salary
You're agreeing with me even though you think you're disagreeing. Yes it is hard for one person (one senior dev salary) to solve large problems most of the time.
> where there is constant arm race in building systems handling millions QPS over petabytes of data and with all recent advanced AI.
Yes I'm saying that at that scale it's very hard to solve the problem by yourself.
My point is that in certain domains your regular devs can't solve problem, there are some 10x experts who can solve it.
For some problems, one 10x expert could be enough, for others you need some team (small), and they will be able to achieve results where NNN randomly hired senior devs from the market won't produce useful product.
So, the goal of IC is to become such 10x expert if he wants to grow as engineer and not as manager.
IC's natural way of growth is to produce larger impact by solving harder problems, there are always hard unsolved problems which hold some business opportunities.