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It's _vastly_ harder to get ahead on the "engineering" track. At Google, for instance, it's to the point where as a manager you barely need to have a pulse to g
by m0zg 8y ago
It's _vastly_ harder to get ahead on the "engineering" track. At Google, for instance, it's to the point where as a manager you barely need to have a pulse to get promoted (as long as your reports are any good), whereas on the technical ladder promotions to Staff level and above are stupid hard and downright nondeterministic.
That's why many engineers there, who have little to no leadership skills or inclinations, end up being managers: it's simply much easier to get ahead on the management track, comparatively speaking. There are simply a lot more senior managers than there are comparatively senior (by comp, the only metric that really matters) engineers, and you aren't competing against as strong a set of peers.
- Bahamut 8y agoThis is also true of my own employer (a fellow FAANG) - the technical track is incredibly hard to advance in past senior, it seems to incentivize devs moving into management, along with the pay differential where even in the same tier, management makes a little more in general by a couple of $10k. I very much enjoy being a dev and am a top performing one in my VP’s org, but the structure incentivizes me to switch over to the management track, which I’d be happy to do (I have prior experience as one), but it seems like a crappy way to depress salaries of ICs that they are forced to switch companies to move up to where they should be.
- democracy 8y agoGoogle aside there is nothing worse than getting stuck at middle management in a software corp after 40 - 50. You are expensive, replacable and disposable.
- m0zg 8y agoOr before 40 for that matter. Middle management is miserable existence. That's probably why they get paid so well, to dull pain a little. :-)
- blub 8y agoOddly enough I've never seen managers complain about ageism or the difficulty of finding jobs later in life, but it seems to be rather common around here. So maybe there is something worse: bring stuck as a developer after 40-50.
- orthoxerox 8y agoMost older middle managers in my org get pushed out into PM roles.
- m0zg 8y agoNot at Google. Google has very few PMs in general.