> But the IC track is flawed. The programmers I spoke with said that promotion is slower on the IC track, and the distinctions between titles are blurry. Accord

> But the IC track is flawed. The programmers I spoke with said that promotion is slower on the IC track, and the distinctions between titles are blurry. According to David Golden, a 45-year-old engineer at MongoDB, “In the development-only track, there’s a bigger hurdle for me to move to the next level. It’s not clear how you get from one to the other and whether it’s something you can actually do anything about.” In my opinion, this is both true but not a problem. The reality is that it's much easier to have a large impact as a manager than as an individual contributor. I have worked with L5's, L6's, and L7's, and honestly I couldn't tell the difference between them. That's not to say the higher level people didn't deserve to be higher level as they had more accomplishments, but I personally didn't really feel like they had much more impact, if any. For all but the largest and most complex projects, there aren't really going to be sufficiently difficult problems that it makes a big difference. I don't think I've ever been on a project where there were more difficult problems than engineers capable of solving those problems for any level of difficulty. > Based on interviews with a half-dozen programmers, it is clear to me that companies should create a qualitatively different role for their most senior individual contributors. Candidates for such roles would be judged by their past effectiveness, the same as managers are, not by a fast-churning checklist of skills. Greater clarity would mean engineers could climb the ladder faster, and the prestige and renewed intellectual challenge of each level would keep programmers motivated into their fifties and sixties. > Proven engineers who occupy the most senior roles should be deployed to solve the hardest problems on the most critical projects. At least at Google, being judged based on past effectiveness and being given the hardest problems is already true. Or rather, higher level engineers have greater independence to be able to choose what problems they'd like to solve.