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"Don’t manage only to advance your career. Many tech companies have parallel career paths to seniority for both technical and managerial high-performers." Is t

• carc 11y ago
  FWIW, I know senior engineers that chose the technical route rather than manager route, who make absolutely ridiculous amounts of money. Like close to 1,000,000/year including equity. I don't know any non VP level people making anywhere close to that. Obviously this is anecdotal though.
  • smt88 11y ago
    "including equity" Pretend the equity is worth zero or close to zero (which it almost always is). How much are those people making then?
    • philwelch 11y ago
      At a startup this is a good rule of thumb, but the more established a company is, the closer to cash equity becomes. At a publicly traded company, equity can be a periodic (albeit variable) cash bonus if you want it to be.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    • gchadwick 11y ago
      > Pretend the equity is worth zero or close to zero (which it almost always is) In a startup or private company yet to IPO sure. In an established, large, public company, RSUs, ESPP and whatever else you get is definitely going to deliver cash. Sure as the market moves around it'll change in value but you might look at it as +- 20% of the expected value. It's certainly not worth 0.
    • carc 11y ago
      Equity is almost always worth close to zero? You realize at publicly traded companies, it might as well be a cash bonus because you can instantly cash it out the second it vests, right?
  • ownagefool 11y ago
    We know these people exist but it's whether or not they're common enough for your better than average tech to land and whether it requires actual technical knowledge or just good salesmanship. I imagine it's a mixture of both, but that if I wasn't a contractor, I'd probably feel it's easier to get paid more by going tech -> team leader -> manager.
    • pc86 11y ago
      I've never heard it suggested that these best-of-the-best types of positions should be attainable by "your better than average tech." If your biggest asset is that you are "better than average" I think even hoping for a generic Senior Software Developer type of position is ambitious.
      • ownagefool 11y ago
        Not everyone can be the best of the best, a lot of us are sadly just a bit better than average and we matter too. The market encompasses more than just the elite. That said, given cultural differences and our abilities to judge their own skill, it's entirely possible your best of the best is just my above average.
      • mixmastamyk 11y ago
        You'd be surprised how mediocre many of people at the top of companies are, technical track or not.
  • __abc 11y ago
    Where? Doing what?
    • carc 11y ago
      Well known, top tier tech companies. I won't get into more than that they're senior engineers (partially because I don't know that I can answer that with more specificity). They all have 10+ years of experience and are typically tech leads on their teams.
      • biot 11y ago
        Can you elaborate on the kinds of work they do? I can't see a senior engineer doing iOS/Android development making that kind of coin, but I can see it for someone who has been working in-depth building out datacenter technology or low-level mobile technology stacks, for example.
  • s73v3r 11y ago
    And I know of plenty of people who play football who make several million dollars a year. The question is, how common is it? In both athletics and engineering, the answer is not all that common.
    • nostrademons 11y ago
      The difference in football is that if you miss the cutoff for several million dollars a year, you make bupkis. In engineering, if you miss the cutoff for $1M/year (which itself is the low-risk alternative to "make a billion or nothing"), you'll make about $250K/year. And if you miss that, you make $200K/year. And if you miss that, $150K/year. Engineering - at least at this point in history - is remarkable among professions where the very top of the pay scale is "the richest man in the world", but there's a relatively smooth progression below that where even a 25th percentile engineer makes a comfortable middle-class lifestyle.
• msravi 11y ago
  It's probably true, but the thresholds to move up to the next level are vastly different. On the "management" ladder, you probably need to mostly stay out of the way of your team and let them execute, while acting occasionally to filter information up/down the chain. If you've stayed in the position for a reasonable time and have not really screwed things up, you advance to the next level. On the technical ladder, on the other hand, you'd really need to make quite a difference to move up to the next level. You'd have to go above and beyond doing your daily expected taken-for-granted work and make technical contributions on your own time to advance to the next level.
  • bonzini 11y ago
    This may be true for the low levels of the management ladder, but it definitely won't take you to the point where you have 2-300 people under you and growing.
    • maxxxxx 11y ago
      Very true. From a certain level on managers have to be extremely high performing. But in the lower ranks it's easier to advance as a manager than for technical people.
• thomasrossi 11y ago
  In Deloitte there are now "orange profiles" which are only technical and are earning more than functional figures. It is true though that at the best of my knowledge no "orange profile" has made it yet to a Board.
  • eitally 11y ago
    But why would they if they're optimizing for technical skills? It seems the two are mostly orthogonal, so this wouldn't be expected. Not many biz execs are superstar engineers.
• netcan 11y ago
  I have no idea if this is true, but just postulating a reason… If you consider management to be a distinct skill,Someone with 10 years of experience engineering and also 10 years in management is (potentially) very skilled in two distinct fields. Imagine you have a lawyer with a PHD in geology and they work on ground water disputes or oil well stuff. Being an expert in two fields is valuable.
  • DamnYuppie 11y ago
    You will lose a lot of your technical skills in 10 years time. Also most companies will force you to become more political and "reasonable". Thereby making it even harder to straddle both as the real engineers will smell the stench of your technical decay a mile away, and will rightly retch all over....
  • cossatot 11y ago
    I agree. In my experience (PhD in geology actually, and decent modeling/statistics/etc.-type programmer but not 'expert' by HN standards), this sort of dual expertise is quite valuable, especially at a higher level: Not only can you be a liaison between the two domains and, say, proficiently implement an idea or interpret scientific findings in terms of case law for your clients, but you can also see opportunities for solving one domain's problems with another domain's tools, when the problem domain may never even realize there's a good solution (or even much of a problem!). In terms of management and engineering, dual experience or expertise could definitely help with understanding how to implement features in a way that encourages collaboration or efficiency between devs, or leaves a feature open for extensibility or interaction with potential features that the engineers aren't aware of yet.
• Ensorceled 11y ago
  In my 30 years of experience, the "parallel" technical track is really only for super stars. As merely a very good developer, management pays better.
  • levosmetalo 11y ago
    And by "superstar", it's usually a person that can communicate his ideas eloquently and knows how to effectively evangelize and self-promote. It has not much to do with the actual technical competency. So, the skillset required to become a "technical superstar" resembles more of a skillset required for good manager or marketing persona than actual engineering skill set, though some level is required.
    • Ensorceled 11y ago
      True, most of the superstars are "architects" who can both come up with excellent technical plans and then socialize/communicate them. I have a had a few "put on head phones and pump out 5 developers worth of excellent code" types as well.
      • jerf 11y ago
        I'm continuing to wander slowly but surely into more architecture roles, and while the term has fully justifiably been badly wrecked by people doing "architecture" who think it involves drawing diagrams with lots of boxes and lines and never checking the architecture against the requirements, there is a legitimate architecture role that does exist and there are legitimate skills that are specialized to that role. I'm not sure it's something that can be taught very well, though. But as one for instance, I could clearly explain to you how the architecture conforms to Conway's Law and exactly why it's shaped the way it is, and not some other way. (Conway's Law is huge for a high-level architect... in a lot of ways you do not so much "create" the architecture as discover how to correctly translate the pre-existing corporate structures into code in the most business-efficient manner. "Architects" in this position who think they're working with a blank slate crash and burn, and probably are the source of the disdain for the term. A real architect is in fact working in some of the most constrained design space there is. In some ways that actually sorta kinda makes the job easier; you can sort through and dismiss a lot of bad choices very quickly with Conway's Law. The biggest challenge is when you get constrained down to zero choices for some problem and have to work Conway's Law in the other direction, and figure out how to fix the corresponding structural failures in the organization itself. It's a lot easier to change code than people structures, but sometimes you have no choice....)
• jasode 11y ago
  >The "parallel" technical career path never seems to deliver equal amounts of power, or even money, as compared to managers on the same level. This is true. There's a self-deprecating joke about CIO being an acronym for "Career Is Over" because the Chief Information Officers are never promoted to CEO. On the other hand, it's common for the board to promote COOs and CFOs to CEOs. If tech people want to be CEOs, they have to be an entrepreneur (e.g. Bill Gates, Larry Page, etc). Also, at small startup companies, CTOs (Chief Technology Officers) sometimes get promoted to CEO. (The CTO is often one of the founders or early employees.) That said, if a tech person has no aspirations for C-level responsibility, the "parallel" career track for technical employees may offer enough progression and pay increases. They're ok with the ceiling being lower for the technical ladder.
  • gadders 11y ago
    If you're a CIO in a large company, your life is more about managing budgets than doing anything technical.
    • sgt101 11y ago
      If you're a CIO at a large company your life is about leadership, or you will become a CIO at a small company really fast.
      • gadders 11y ago
        In my experience, some are leaders. Most are just managers.
    • sarwechshar 11y ago
      I don't remember the last time I saw a company with a "CIO". It seems to be a dying trend. Interesting fact: CIOs are also known as Chief Investment Officers (mainly in finance) and play an integral role to the company, perhaps in importance second only to the CEO.
      • o_nate 11y ago
• anotherdatem 11y ago
  I'm a VP at a mid-sized ($100mm revenue) startup. I report to the CTO, and am his probable successor. I make slightly less than our highest paid engineer. I would recommend finding a company with a true parallel track, rather than dedicating yourself to a job that you don't want, and thus likely won't ever be great at.
  • msravi 11y ago
    An honest question: Does the highest paid engineer know that (s)he makes slightly more than you? If so, does (s)he know of it in an official capacity or has (s)he sort-of figured it out? Oftentimes, I've found that management operates from a position of informational advantage, while a person on a parallel technical track at the same level has access to a lot less information. Hence the question.
    • adaml_623 11y ago
      That's a really good question
    • k__ 11y ago
      Where I worked, there were a few senjor devs who got the biggest pay-checks. Funny thing is, they weren't the most influencial people, they just got a problem and solved it. If the times were though, they sometimes even were "set free" because they company could operate without them, just don't do much new stuff anymore.
    • dwmtm 11y ago
      Is there any meaningful sense in which a tech-tracker has more official or unofficial access to information?
      • msravi 11y ago
        Sorry, it's late here and my brain is just unable to parse your sentence. Are you asking if it matters if the information is gained officially or unofficially?
• eitally 11y ago
  The challenge is that a lot of companies don't place engineers into the "critical skills" category, which leads to the [perceived by business & IT leadership] natural method of increasing an excellent engineer's sphere of influence being to promote them into management. Sometimes this works wonderfully, but it's obvious how spectacularly it can fail, too. If a company doesn't have engineering as a core competency, they're far more likely to fall into this trap than a company that does. I'm speaking from experience here, having spent 15 years working for a company where promoting "technical managers" was a source of pride ... and 90% of the time the fallout of such promotions was that engineering quality degraded.
• jackgavigan 11y ago
  > The "parallel" technical career path never seems to deliver equal amounts of power, or even money, as compared to managers on the same level. The scope of a person focused solely on technology is narrower than the typical scope of senior management, and does not typically cover key functions like strategy (i.e. top-level decision-making) and sales (i.e. revenue generation). I'm not saying that the latter are more valuable than the former but I will just point out that there are plenty of examples of companies with great technology that fail because of poor strategy or an inability to market their product/service as effectively as competitors who have crappy technology but better (or, at least, more effective) sales and marketing. I think that managers also enjoy leverage from the people/teams/resources they manage - a kind of reflected-glory halo effect. The equivalent for a technologist (e.g. the creation of technology that makes others more productive) is not as obvious in most companies for various reasons (e.g. senior management lack of understanding of the impact technology has upon their company, non-technical managers' greater focus on self-promotion).
• _pmf_ 11y ago
  > Is this really true? No. Even the poster boy companies have fancy titles and slight salary upgraded, but nothing that could be called a career path.
• analog31 11y ago
  The company where I work has the parallel career paths, but like you say, has a much higher proportion of managers at the higher levels. In my view, money and advancement have to be part of the motivation for becoming a manager. Otherwise, it's too stressful and boring, and nobody would do it. My evidence is that every person who has joined management at the lowest rung, where the work is the most boring and unrewarding, has been somebody with a family to support.
• JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  Until engineering decides to do something about it, engineering will always be subordinate to management. There are no true parallel career paths.
  • michaelochurch 11y ago
    Until engineering decides to do something about it, engineering will always be subordinate to management. There are no true parallel career paths. You nailed it. That is all. If we want respect, we have to fucking earn it by forcing businessmen to see us as equals, whatever the effort and cost.
    • pc86 11y ago
      I'm curious what exactly you have in mind.
      • michaelochurch 11y ago
        Well, if nothing else works, a programmer's union. I'd prefer something more like the Screen Actor's Guild, which provides support (legal assistance if you need it, access to talent agents) but doesn't regulate compensation. That said, I don't think things necessarily need to go that way, and I don't want to see the negatives of traditional labor unions. But that shouldn't be off the table. The other side isn't going to play nice, so neither should we.
        • toby 11y ago
          FYI, SAG does set minimum compensation, working conditions, meal requirements, etc. It doesn't set upper bounds or demand that more senior people get the better jobs. It's also somewhat difficult to get into. Any aspiring actor can't just go and join.
          • michaelochurch 11y ago
            FYI, SAG does set minimum compensation, working conditions, meal requirements, etc. It doesn't set upper bounds or demand that more senior people get the better jobs. Sounds like what we need in software: downside protection (especially against managerial misbehavior) but no limit on the upside, and no stupid seniority system. It's also somewhat difficult to get into. Any aspiring actor can't just go and join. How does it work?
• wahsd 11y ago
  It's an unfortunate truth of our society and business culture that we see these things as linear, hierarchical progressions rather than what they are, different roles with different purposes. Just like in the educational sphere we see High School < Bachelor < Master < PhD, there is a tendency to see technical < managerial from a leadership perspective and managerial < technical from a technical perspective. I wish we would move away from that stupid way of thinking. Devs are one role, PMs play another role, managers, directors, VPs ... they all should be serving distinct and different yet essentially equal roles, yet we see it as a competition and instill an artificial hierarchy. It's really only a symptom of a larger social value structure thing though, so it won't change any time soon or without a disruptive process in between the two states.
• michaelochurch 11y ago
  The "parallel" technical career path never seems to deliver equal amounts of power, or even money, as compared to managers on the same level. Very true. Engineering is the hard way up, because there's so much less of the title and grade and salary inflation on the management track. Take Google. If you're a manager and don't make Director in 5 years, you fucked something up. On the other hand, the Director-equivalent Principal Engineer rank is 3 jumps (all of them non-trivial to make) above Senior. When I was at Google (and this is probably no longer true) the number of Principal+ Engineers at Google NYC was... zero. The cynic in me suspects that dual-track organizations actually serve management's goals by making it look rank-per-rank superior, just as the lopsided college admissions climate convinces middle-class public school kids that prep kids who get into Harvard are somehow impressive (because it is very hard to get into an Ivy from a middle-class background, but really easy for rich legacy kids). If you make it astronomically difficult to become a VP-equivalent engineer, then the VPs (who had a much easier climb) look more impressive. Far from providing a genuine alternative path to success, this process cements the tribal superiority of management. Most telling is that when Google really wants someone and is competing with finance or Facebook and gives them a High-Compensation Plan (HCP), the person is put on the management ladder, even if that person intends and expects to be a full-time programmer. It's really hard to justify a $500,000 salary for an engineer but much easier if you give that person a managerial title. I'd imagine that Google isn't alone in this. It's probably a standard big-company thing. Engineers (and, in finance, also quants and strats) also share some of the blame for the relative grade deflation, because we beat each other up relative to businessmen. They give each other consistently high marks and talk each other up. We're far too honest. And this "honesty" is something I've come to view negatively because what it really is, is ratting someone out to management, often cheaply or for free. My inclination, if they aren't hurting me or a project that I care about, is to protect underperformers, not because I like it when people underperform, but because information is power and I'm not going to share honest performance information on other people unless there is a legitimate reason to do so. (I care if someone is fucking up my project, or an existential threat to the company or my career. I don't care if he's costing someone else's company a salary while doing nothing; that's not an existential threat, so who cares?) But engineers have a storied history of being willing to tear each other down for cheap or even for free, and technology management has been exploiting our lack of tribal cohesion, in order to turn us against each other, for decades.
• kelukelugames 11y ago
  This is as true as: 1) We value work life balance! 2) We only hire the best! Everyone here is a rock star. 3) We love diversity! 4) We have an open door policy. You can complain about anything!
  • pc86 11y ago
    > 1) We value work life balance! I interviewed somewhere that specifically mentioned #1 in the job description. I applied in part because it was the only job ad I had seen to that point specifically mentioning it. It was brought up again in the interview as a perk of the job, by the person who would be my boss, without my prompting. In the very next sentence he made a generalization about being confused as to why developers would not willingly work 45-50 hours a week as a rule and how "40-hour clock watchers" never lasted long at the company. The cognitive dissonance was staggering.
    • s73v3r 11y ago
      Wow. That person sounds like an entitled ass.
    • sarwechshar 11y ago
      I don't disagree with the guy on the "clock watchers" point but he should appreciate that in some cases people's circumstances push them to become "clock watchers". If they commit and produce excellent work during the time they are there then they should last. Also, yeah, that doesn't make sense at all! It suggests they didn't a) read the job spec or b) believe in the company's values or c) perhaps the phrase was really "We value [when you] work [your] life [out of] balance" ;)
  • potatolicious 11y ago
    The best way to tell if some company actually gives a shit about the above is to ask them what they are doing about it. I interviewed at a company once where the answer to #1 is "we do 4-day work weeks and make sure people are actually working 32-hour weeks instead of 40-hours-in-4-days". They seemed like they actually gave a shit. Ditto diversity - companies love to talk a lot of smack about hiring women and racial minorities, but ask them about actual programs, policies, or structures in place to pursue this goal and... crickets. But yeah, in most places the answer to "what are you doing about these things you allegedly value" is "absolutely nothing".
• gaius 11y ago
  At one previous job, they tried the "technical career track" scam, but the most senior engineer still reported to the most junior manager.